A country · 1,170 places · 37 regions

India, all of it.

1,170 curated places across 37 regions — photographed, mapped, and noted with the season each is best in.

Mehrangarh · via Wikimedia Commons

The 4 biggest regions — Karnataka, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and National Capital Territory of Delhi — read below as chapters, with 33 more waiting past them.

Chapter I · Karnataka · 89 places

Karnataka

Hampi lies on the south bank of the Tungabhadra River in Vijayanagara district, east-central Karnataka, about 140 km north-east of the Badami and Aihole rock-cut sites. The setting is unlike anywhere else in India: a field of granite boulders, some the size of houses, stacked and balanced across roughly 40 square kilometres of low hills, with banana plantations and paddy in the irrigated river bottom between them. The stone is ancient — among the oldest exposed rock on the subcontinent — and it weathers into rounded forms that catch a hard orange light at both ends of the day. The Group of Monuments at Hampi has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1986. The story behind it. As Vijayanagara, this was the capital of an empire that ran most of southern India from 1336 to 1565. It was a fortified metropolis, and foreign visitors struggled to convey the scale. Niccolò de' Conti, an Italian merchant who came around 1420, put its circumference at sixty miles. Abdul Razzaq, arriving from Persia in 1442, counted seven concentric lines of fortification, the outer rings enclosing farmland and the inner ones packed with bazaars. In 1520 the Portuguese trader Domingo Paes wrote that Vijayanagara was "as large as Rome, and very beautiful to the sight… the best provided city in the world". By 1500 it is estimated to have been the second-largest city on earth after Beijing. It ended abruptly. At the Battle of Talikota in 1565 a coalition of Deccan sultanates defeated the empire and beheaded its regent Aliya Rama Raya; the city was sacked and burned over six months and then simply abandoned. An Italian traveller who came a few decades later found the houses standing and empty, occupied by tigers. What you actually see today. The Virupaksha temple at Hampi Bazaar is the one building that never stopped functioning — a Shiva temple with a pre-imperial core, a fifty-metre eastern gopura, and painted ceilings in the hall Krishnadevaraya added, showing the marriage of Shiva and Parvati alongside scenes from the Ramayana. The Vittala temple, two kilometres downriver, holds the stone chariot: a shrine to Garuda carved as a temple car with wheels that once turned, its superstructure removed in the 1940s. It is the single most reproduced image in Karnataka, and since 18 August 2017 it has been printed on the reverse of the Indian ₹50 note. The Vittala complex also has the celebrated musical pillars, slender granite columns that ring at different pitches. Elsewhere: the Hazara Rama temple, the royal family's ceremonial shrine, with outer walls carved in horizontal bands of elephants, horsemen, soldiers, dancers and crowds that reproduce the Mahanavami procession; two monolithic Ganeshas on Hemakuta hill, the larger over 4.5 m tall and carved in place; the ruined Krishna temple of 1515 with its long colonnaded market street; the Achyutaraya temple of 1534; the Lakshmi Narasimha monolith, scorched and broken but restored; and in the royal centre the Lotus Mahal, the elephant stables and the stepped tanks, where Islamic arch and dome forms sit inside a Hindu capital without apology. A mosque, octagonal well and tomb built in 1439 by Ahmad Khan, a Muslim officer of the Hindu king Devaraya II, survive in the irrigated valley. Preservation here has been contentious: the site spent several years on the List of World Heritage in Danger from 1999 after bridge and road construction encroached on the protected zone, and in 2011 the shops and guesthouses that had grown inside the colonnaded Hampi Bazaar were cleared by the authorities. On screen. Hampi's landscape has been used by southern cinema for decades — the Telugu feature Pournami (2006) shot scenes here, and the boulder fields and gopuras recur in Kannada and Telugu period productions. It is also worth being precise about what did not happen here: several widely repeated claims that recent epics were filmed at Hampi do not hold up, and much of what looks like Hampi in modern Indian cinema is digital work built from Vijayanagara references rather than footage shot on site. The ruins have shaped the visual grammar of the Indian period film without often hosting the camera. Getting there and timing. Hosapete (Hospet), 13 km away, is the railhead, with overnight trains from Bengaluru and Goa; Hubballi airport is about 145 km off. Coracles still ferry people across the Tungabhadra to Anegundi and Virupapur Gaddi on the north bank, the older half of the site and the one identified in the Ramayana with Kishkindha. Distances between monument clusters are real — hire a bicycle, a scooter or an auto for the day. November to February is the only comfortable season; April and May routinely exceed 40 °C on open rock with no shade at all.

Hampi

Karnataka, India

✦ October to March · $

Coorg district

Karnataka, India

✦ October to May · $$

Jog Falls

Karnataka, India

✦ July to October · $

All 89 places in Karnataka →

via Wikimedia Commons

Chapter II · Rajasthan · 86 places

Rajasthan

Mehrangarh occupies a sandstone bluff about 122 metres above Jodhpur, and the drop on the city side is close to sheer — in places the wall and the cliff are indistinguishable, because the masons quarried the rock they were standing on and built with it. The complex covers something on the order of 1,200 acres of hill, ridge and rock garden. Below the northern and eastern walls spreads the old town of Navchokiya, whose houses are washed in the indigo blue that gives Jodhpur its nickname, and from the ramparts that blue reads as a solid field broken by the white spike of the Jaswant Thada cenotaph, about 700 metres away. The story behind it. Rao Jodha of the Rathore clan founded the fort in 1459, moving his seat from Mandore some nine kilometres north, and most of what stands today was built by his successors in the seventeenth century. Seven gates punctuate the winding entrance road. Jai Pol was raised by Maharaja Man Singh in 1806 to mark victories over the armies of Jaipur and Bikaner; the second gate still carries the pockmarks of cannonballs fired in those sieges. Fateh Pol commemorates Ajit Singh's expulsion of the Mughals in the early eighteenth century. At Loha Pol, a set of small handprints cut into the wall records the widows of Maharaja Man Singh who committed sati in 1843 — a detail that visitors tend to walk past and that says more about the fort's history than most of its palaces. Rudyard Kipling described the place as a palace built by titans and coloured by the morning sun, and the phrase has followed it ever since. What you actually see. Inside the walls, a sequence of palaces opens off courtyards: Moti Mahal, the pearl palace, with a ceiling of shell-lime plaster; Phool Mahal, gilded and painted for private audience; Sheesh Mahal with mirror-inlay; Takhat Vilas, the last ruler's own room, its ceiling hung with Christmas-tree baubles; and the Zenana Deodi, screened in carved jali so fine it functions as a lattice curtain. The museum, run by the Mehrangarh Museum Trust rather than by a government department, is among the best presented in India — palanquins, elephant howdahs, Marwar miniature paintings, turbans and arms — and the trust's independence is also why film crews find the fort comparatively workable. On the rock below the walls, a restored desert rock park replanted with native Aravalli species is a rare piece of ecological conservation attached to a heritage site. A Chamunda Mataji temple, installed by Rao Jodha when the fort was founded, still draws local worshippers to the southern end of the ramparts, and the terrace beside it gives the widest view over the blue town. On screen. Mehrangarh's international moment came with The Dark Knight Rises (2012). Christopher Nolan's production filmed in Jodhpur, using the fort's exterior walls and setting for the world outside the Pit, the underground prison where Bruce Wayne is held and from which he eventually climbs; for the prison's inner face the production used the terraced walls of Chand Baori, the stepwell at Abhaneri, some 300 kilometres east. Indian cinema had been there long before: Aamir Khan's Thugs of Hindostan (2018) shot at Mehrangarh, and Jodhpur's fort and blue city appear in Hum Saath-Saath Hain and in work connected to Jodhaa Akbar. Tarsem Singh's The Fall (2006), a film built entirely from real locations across two dozen countries, used the blue houses below the fort for some of its most-reproduced images. Getting there and timing. Jodhpur has an airport with daily flights from Delhi and Mumbai, and good overnight trains from Jaisalmer, Jaipur and Delhi. The fort is a steep 20-minute walk up from the clock tower and Sardar Market, or five minutes by auto-rickshaw; a lift carries visitors from the ticket level to the palace courtyards, which makes a substantial part of the museum reachable without stairs, though the ramparts and lower gates are not. October to March is the comfortable window, with November and December ideal. Two festivals are worth planning around: the Rajasthan International Folk Festival, held on the ramparts around the October full moon, and the World Sacred Spirit Festival in February. A zip-line circuit runs over the fort's lakes and walls for those who want the view from the air. Allow three hours; the audio guide is unusually good and included in the ticket.

✦ October to February · $$

Meet Mehrangarh All 86 places in Rajasthan →

Chapter III · Tamil Nadu · 76 places

Tamil Nadu

Ooty — officially Udhagamandalam, and Ootacamund on Raj-era letterheads — occupies a shallow bowl at 2,240 m in the Nilgiri Mountains, the block of high country where the Western Ghats reach their southern maximum before the Palghat Gap slices them off. The Moyar river forms the northern edge, separating the range from Karnataka. The town spreads across roughly 30 square kilometres of what was once a mosaic of open grassland on the slopes and dense evergreen shola forest tucked into the folds between them. Doddabetta, at 2,623 m the highest point in the Nilgiris, rises about 10 km east; from its summit on a clear February morning the ground falls away two vertical kilometres to the Coimbatore plains. How it was built. The Toda people called the place orrai-kal manru, roughly "single-stone meeting ground", after a sacred stone; the British mangled it into Ootacamund. In 1818 two assistants to John Sullivan, then Collector of Coimbatore, walked up to Kotagiri and reported that the climate was European. Sullivan wrote to the Board of Revenue on 31 July 1819, built himself a house, and pushed a cart road up from Sirumugai that opened in May 1823 and was extended towards Coonoor between 1830 and 1832. By 1827 Ooty was the official sanatorium of the Madras Presidency. The Government Botanical Garden was laid out across 51 acres in 1842, a library followed in 1859, and the town became a municipality in 1866, drawing water from the Marlimund and Tiger Hill reservoirs. The Stone House, Sullivan's own bungalow, still stands on the Government Arts College campus, and St Stephen's Church of 1829 is roofed with heavy timbers said to have been hauled up from Tipu Sultan's palace at Srirangapatna. What the planters changed. The native cover was grassland and shola. Planters replaced most of it with tea, and with eucalyptus, wattle and pine brought in for fuel and timber — species that took over so thoroughly that the hillsides now read as Australian as often as Indian. What survived is protected: Ooty sits inside the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, declared in 1986 and part of UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere network, which holds one of India's densest Bengal tiger populations along with elephant and gaur. The gaur in particular wander into town gardens at dawn and are best given a very wide berth. The people who were here first have not vanished either: Toda families still keep barrel-vaulted thatched munds on the downs above the town, and the Tribal Research Centre about 10 km out holds artefacts and early photographs of the Badaga, Toda, Kota, Irula and Kurumba communities of the Nilgiris. On screen. Ooty has been a shooting base for Tamil, Telugu and Hindi productions for six decades, largely because a hill station with lawns, boats, eucalyptus avenues and reliably soft light can stand in for almost anywhere. David Lean used the town among his Indian locations for A Passage to India in 1984. The single most-replayed image of the Nilgiris, though, was shot on the railway that ends here: the "Chaiyya Chaiyya" sequence from Mani Ratnam's Dil Se.. (1998), performed on the roof of a moving Nilgiri Mountain Railway train on the Coonoor–Ooty stretch, photographed by Santosh Sivan. Local crews still refer to a shoot in these hills as an Ooty schedule. What you actually see today. The Botanical Garden holds a fossilised tree trunk around 20 million years old and hosts a flower show every May that fills the terraces with competitive begonias. The Government Rose Garden, stepped up the slope of Elk Hill at about 2,200 m, is the largest in India, with more than 20,000 varieties drawn from some 2,800 cultivars. Ooty Lake, an artificial sheet of about 65 acres, was created in 1824 by damming a mountain stream and now carries pedal boats and a small railway along its bank; a deer park opened along its edge in 1986 and is the second-highest-altitude zoo in the country. The golf course sits at 2,300 m across 78 hectares, and the racecourse still runs a season. Bakeries sell Ooty varkey, a crisp layered biscuit that keeps for weeks. Getting there and timing. The classic approach is the metre-gauge rack railway from Mettupalayam, roughly five hours uphill. By road it is about 90 km from Coimbatore airport up 36 hairpin bends. The climate is subtropical highland: 10–25 °C in summer, 0–21 °C in winter, with a record high of 29.4 °C on 30 April 2024 and a recorded low of −5.1 °C. Around 1,100 mm of rain falls across both monsoons, so June to August is wet and often fogged in. April to June brings Indian holiday crowds and the flower show; September to November is quieter, greener and clearer.

Ooty

Tamil Nadu, India

✦ October to June · $

Mamallapuram

Tamil Nadu, India

✦ October to March · $

Madurai

Tamil Nadu, India

✦ October to March · $

All 76 places in Tamil Nadu →

via Wikimedia Commons

Chapter IV · National Capital Territory of Delhi · 75 places

National Capital Territory of Delhi

The Masjid-i-Jahan-Numa — the mosque with a view of the world, universally called the Jama Masjid — stands on Bhojla Pahari, a rocky knoll that Shah Jahan's engineers chose precisely because it lifted the building above the roofline of his new capital. It is about 500 metres south-west of the Red Fort, at the end of a short axis that once ran straight from the fort's Delhi Gate. Three flights of red sandstone steps climb to its three gateways; the eastern flight, the widest, was the royal approach and is now the one lined with vendors, pigeon-feed sellers and the bicycle rickshaws that work Meena Bazaar below. The story behind it. Construction ran from 1644 to 1656 under Shah Jahan, using a workforce conventionally numbered at five thousand and a budget of about a million rupees of the day. The emperor invited Syed Abdul Ghafoor Shah Bukhari from Bukhara to lead the first prayers, and the office of Shahi Imam has descended in that family since. Until 1857 it functioned as the imperial mosque of the Mughals. After the revolt the British occupied it, quartered troops inside, and seriously discussed demolishing it as a punitive measure; it was returned to the Muslim community in the early 1860s under conditions. It remains a working congregational mosque rather than a museum piece, which shapes everything about a visit. What the building actually is. The plan is a vast open rectangle: a courtyard of roughly 100 by 90 metres with an ablution tank at its centre, held by arcaded cloisters and closed on the west by the prayer hall. That hall carries eleven arches, the central one taller and framed by a rectangular pishtaq, above which three bulbous marble domes are banded in black stripes — a device Shah Jahan's architects used to keep a very wide facade legible from a distance. Two minarets of alternating red sandstone and white marble rise about 40 metres at the corners; the southern one can be climbed by a tight internal stair of some 120 steps, and the view from the top is the best available reading of Old Delhi's roof plan. A small room off the north gate holds relics venerated by the community, among them a Quran said to be written on deerskin. On screen. The mosque is one of the most-filmed silhouettes in Hindi cinema, usually as the establishing image that says this is the old city — a flight of pigeons off the courtyard, the domes behind. It appears in Delhi-6 (2009), where the mohalla's life is organised around it, though Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra shot most of that film on a replica set at Sambhar in Rajasthan and used the real precinct sparingly. Sequences for Kurbaan and Sultan were also filmed in the Jama Masjid area, and the surrounding lanes turn up in Fukrey and Delhi Belly. Filming here is negotiated with the mosque's own management committee rather than only with the Archaeological Survey of India, which is why productions tend to work the steps and the bazaar outside rather than the courtyard itself. What you actually see today. Entry is free; a camera charge is collected at the gate, and shoes are left at the threshold for a small fee. Visitors are asked to dress with shoulders and legs covered, and gowns are lent at the entrance. The courtyard empties and fills five times a day, and the mosque closes to sightseers during each prayer and for roughly forty-five minutes around Friday midday, when the congregation can run into tens of thousands. Below the eastern steps, Meena Bazaar sells caps, prayer beads, perfume oils and dried fruit. Behind the southern side, Gali Kababian holds Karim's, trading since 1913, and the surrounding lanes of Matia Mahal cook nihari, korma and seekh kebabs from before dawn during Ramadan. Getting there and timing. Jama Masjid metro station on the Violet Line is a five-minute walk; Chawri Bazaar on the Yellow Line is a slightly longer approach through the paper market. Late afternoon is the best light — the western wall glows and the marble picks up warmth — and the hour before sunset, when the courtyard fills quietly, is the most rewarding time to sit on the steps. The building is not step-free: every approach involves a substantial flight, and the courtyard sandstone is hot enough in summer to make crossing it barefoot genuinely painful, so a mid-morning or evening visit between October and March is the sensible plan.

✦ October to March · $

Meet Jama Masjid, Delhi All 75 places in National Capital Territory of Delhi →