Heritage
Heritage travel is where India quietly outclasses everywhere else. We focus on the unrenovated, the under-visited, and the families still living inside the walls.
Places we plan
16 places we’ve walked, returned to, and would send a friend.
Rajasthan
Bundi
A blue-painted hill town with a 14th-century palace nobody renovated, stepwells in residential lanes, and Kipling's old guesthouse still standing.
Gujarat
Champaner-Pavagadh
India's only pre-Mughal Islamic city left intact — UNESCO-listed, almost empty of tourists, with a living Kalika temple still drawing pilgrims to the hilltop above.
Andhra Pradesh
Lepakshi
A 16th-century Vijayanagara temple with India's largest monolithic Nandi, a hanging pillar, and ceiling murals nobody has retouched in 470 years.
Tamil Nadu
Mahabalipuram
Pallava rock-cut shore temples, granite carved like fabric, and a stone-carving guild still working seven streets back from the sea.
Madhya Pradesh
Mandu
A 12-square-kilometre ridge-top city of Afghan-style tombs and pavilions, abandoned in the 1700s, now grazed by goats and visited by almost no one.
Uttar Pradesh
Banaras
The river, the lanes, and a city that has never paused.
Rajasthan
Jaipur
The pink city, but seen through the families that built it.
Rajasthan
Jodhpur
The blue city, stepwells, and Mehrangarh against a desert sky.
Uttar Pradesh
Agra
The Taj at first light from the far bank, an emperor's prison cell with the best view in India, and a Mughal capital most people leave in four hours.
Delhi
Delhi
Eight cities stacked on one plain. We give you the two nobody schedules — Mehrauli at dawn and Nizamuddin on a Thursday night.
Rajasthan
Udaipur
A lake city that photographs too easily. Go up into the Aravallis behind it, and out to the stepwells and miniature-painting workshops.
Rajasthan
Jaisalmer
One of the world's last inhabited fortresses — roughly 3,000 people still live inside the walls — plus the merchant havelis and the dunes past Khuri.
Karnataka
Hampi
The ruined capital of Vijayanagara across 26 square kilometres of boulder field — a World Heritage site you explore by bicycle and coracle.
Maharashtra
Ajanta & Ellora
Two rock-cut sites 100 km apart — 2nd-century BCE Buddhist painting at Ajanta, and at Ellora a Hindu temple carved downward out of one cliff.
Odisha
Konark
A 13th-century temple built as the sun god's chariot — twenty-four carved stone wheels, seven horses — and the least-crowded stretch of the Odisha coast behind it.
Karnataka
Mysore
The Wodeyar palace lit by 97,000 bulbs on Sunday nights, a hill temple above the city, and the sandalwood-and-silk trades that still run here.
Who plans this · Heritage
Reena on Heritage.
Heritage travel is where India quietly outclasses everywhere else. We focus on the unrenovated, the under-visited, and the families still living inside the walls.
“Forts you'll remember aren't the famous ones. They're the ones with someone still living inside.”