Jaipur: what to see, where to stay and how to get around
Jaipur was founded in 1727 and it is the first planned city in India — laid out on paper before a stone was laid, on a grid of nine rectangular blocks taken from the Vastu Shastra, by a Bengali engineer called Vidyadhar Bhattacharya. The streets have three fixed widths in a strict hierarchy. One block had to be displaced because a hill was in the way, so its mirror was moved to the other side to keep the count at nine. Two and a half hours, flat.
A short history of Jaipur
Jaipur was founded in 1727 by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II, who moved his capital here from Amber in the hills. The city was planned in advance as a grid of rectangular quarters, something rare in India at the time. Jai Singh, who was interested in astronomy, built the Jantar Mantar observatory here in the 1720s and 1730s. In 1876, ahead of a visit by the Prince of Wales, the old city was painted pink, and since then it has been called the "Pink City". In 2019 the walled city was declared a World Heritage Site.
The ten best sights in Jaipur
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1The Pink City
Founded 1727, the first planned city in India, and UNESCO listed since 2019
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2Hawa Mahal
600 rupees for foreigners. 953 windows, five storeys, and no staircase. Verified 10/2026
3Jantar Mantar600 rupees. A UNESCO site, and the sundial is accurate to two seconds. Verified 10/2026
4City Palace300 rupees, plus 700 for Chandra Mahal. The family still lives in it. Verified 10/2026
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5Chandra Mahal
The seven-storey royal residence; the top floors are private
6Mubarak MahalThe 1900 reception palace, now the costume museum, with a 250-kilo robe in it
7Amber Fort500 rupees for foreigners, 100 for Indians. 08:00–17:30. Verified 10/2026
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8Amer village
The old capital below the fort, and it was the seat before Jaipur existed
9Jaigarh FortIt holds the Jaivana, the largest wheeled cannon in the world, fired once
10Nahargarh Fort600 rupees. Built 1734 as a retreat, and the sunset view of the whole grid. Verified 10/2026
Scan with your phone camera to open the map there
What is an audio walk?
Tours in Jaipur →A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in Jaipur:
Free walking tours in Jaipur
The city that was drawn before it was built
Jaipur was founded in 1727 and it is the first planned city in India — laid out on paper before a stone was laid, on a grid of nine rectangular blocks taken from the Vastu Shastra, by a Bengali engineer called Vidyadhar Bhattacharya. The streets have three fixed widths in a strict hierarchy. One block had to be displaced because a hill was in the way, so its mirror was moved to the other side to keep the count at nine. Two and a half hours, flat.
- Hawa Mahal · Nine hundred and fifty-three jali windows on five storeys, built in 1799 so that the women of the court could watch street processions without being seen. There is no staircase in it — only ramps, because the women were carried up — and it is one room deep, a facade with corridors behind it rather than a building. Six hundred rupees for foreigners, verified 10/2026.
- Jantar Mantar · Nineteen stone astronomical instruments built by Jai Singh II by 1734, and the largest of them, the Samrat Yantra, is a sundial twenty-seven metres high that reads local time to an accuracy of about two seconds. Jai Singh built five of these observatories and sent for Portuguese and French astronomical tables before designing them. UNESCO listed it in 2010. Six hundred rupees, verified 10/2026.
- City Palace · Still the residence of the family that founded the city — the top floors of Chandra Mahal are private and lived in. In the Diwan-i-Khas stand two silver urns that are the largest single silver objects in the world: Madho Singh the Second had them made in 1902 to carry Ganges water to England for Edward the Seventh’s coronation, because he would not drink anything else. Three hundred rupees, verified 10/2026.
- Pritam Niwas Chowk · The courtyard inside the palace has four painted doorways, one for each season and each dedicated to a god: the peacock gate for autumn and Vishnu, the lotus for summer and Shiva, the green gate for spring and Ganesha, the rose gate for winter and Devi. It is the single most photographed corner of the palace and almost nobody is told what the four are for.
- Tripolia Bazaar · Walk here and notice the widths: the city was laid out in 1727 with three street grades — the main bazaars at about one hundred and eleven feet, the secondary streets at fifty-five, the lanes at twenty-seven, each exactly half the one above. The triple gate this bazaar is named after is reserved for the royal family; everyone else uses the two beside it.
- Iswari Minar · A minaret built in the 1740s by Jai Singh’s son Iswari Singh to mark a victory, and you can climb it for a few rupees — the only place in the old city where the nine-block grid is visible as a grid. Iswari Singh himself took poison in 1750 rather than face a Maratha army, and twenty-one of his wives and concubines burned themselves afterwards.
The forts above the city
Jaipur was built in 1727 because the old capital had run out of water and space, and the old capital is eleven kilometres up the valley: Amber, a fort begun in 1592 by Raja Man Singh, who was Akbar’s general and the reason this dynasty prospered. Above it is a second fort that holds the largest wheeled cannon in the world, and across the ridge a third that was the escape route between them. Half a day with a car.
- Amber Fort · Begun in 1592 by Man Singh, the Rajput general who commanded Akbar’s armies — the Kachwahas were the first Rajput house to ally with the Mughals rather than fight them, and the wealth of this fort is the dividend. The Sheesh Mahal inside it is lined with convex mirror fragments cut so that a single candle lights the whole room. Five hundred rupees for foreigners, verified 10/2026.
- Ganesh Pol · The painted gate into the private courtyards, and above it is a screened gallery called the Suhag Mandir — the women of the court sat behind those lattices to watch ceremonies in the courtyard below without being seen. The same solution as the Hawa Mahal in the city, built two hundred years earlier, which is how you can tell the city copied the fort.
- Panna Meena ka Kund · A sixteenth-century stepwell below the fort with symmetrical criss-crossing staircases on all four walls, and the local rule about it is that you cannot come back up the same staircase you went down — the flights are arranged so that no two adjacent ones connect. It was the village water supply and the women’s meeting place, and it is free.
- Jaigarh Fort · It holds the Jaivana, cast here in 1720 and still the largest wheeled cannon in the world — it was fired exactly once, as a test, and the shot is said to have landed thirty-five kilometres away. In 1976 the Indian government searched this fort for months for the Amber treasure after a tax case; officially nothing was found.
- Nahargarh Fort · Built in 1734 on the ridge directly above the new city, and the three forts — Amber, Jaigarh and Nahargarh — were connected by walls so the court could move between them without descending. The name means tiger fort, and local tradition says construction kept collapsing until a shrine was built to the spirit of a Rathore prince whose land it was. Six hundred rupees, verified 10/2026.
- Jal Mahal · Five storeys, four of them under water, and the lake itself is artificial — a dam was built across this valley in 1610 after a famine, to store water. The palace was a duck-shooting lodge. You cannot go in; it was closed to visitors after a restoration and the view from the road is the whole experience, which is worth knowing before you plan time for it.
What the city actually makes
Jaipur is not a museum town — it is a manufacturing city, and has been since 1727, because Jai Singh brought craftsmen in and gave each trade its own street. The city cuts more emeralds than anywhere in the world, prints more hand-blocked cloth than anywhere in India, and makes a blue pottery that contains no clay at all. The bazaars are arranged by trade, which means the grid is also a directory. Two hours.
- Johari Bazaar · The jewellers’ street, and the scale is not obvious from the shopfronts: Jaipur cuts and polishes the majority of the world’s emeralds and is one of the largest centres anywhere for coloured stones, with the actual cutting done in small family workshops in the lanes behind. The local speciality is kundan and meenakari — stone setting on one side of a piece and enamel on the other.
- Bapu Bazaar · Textiles and camel-leather shoes, and the cloth here is the city’s second industry: hand block printing, where a carved wooden block is dipped and struck by hand, one colour at a time, one block at a time. A printer does about six hundred impressions an hour and a complex design needs four or five blocks over the same cloth, perfectly aligned.
- Chandpole Bazaar · Marble and stone carving, with the workshops open to the street so you can watch the work. Jaipur has carved marble idols for temples across India for three centuries, and the trade still runs on the apprentice system — a carver works under one master for years before he is given a face to cut, because a face is the part that cannot be corrected.
- Blue pottery · Jaipur blue pottery contains no clay at all: it is made from ground quartz, powdered glass, borax and gum, which is why it is translucent at the edges and why it is fired only once at a low temperature. The technique came from Persia through Afghanistan with Mughal craftsmen, and Jaipur is now the only place in India that still makes it.
- Masala Chowk · An open-air food court the state set up in 2017 inside Ram Niwas garden, specifically to give the city’s best-known street stalls a clean licensed site — the pyaaz kachori, the lassi, the kulfi and the chaat vendors are the originals, not franchises. It solves the problem every visitor to India has: the food you want is on the street and you are afraid of the street.
- Albert Hall Museum · Opened in 1887 and designed by Samuel Swinton Jacob as an Indo-Saracenic building, and the collection was assembled on purpose as a reference library of craft: the maharaja wanted Jaipur’s artisans to have examples of the best work from everywhere to study. It also holds an Egyptian mummy, bought in 1887 from Cairo, which is still the single most visited object in it. Six hundred rupees, verified 10/2026.
Getting to Jaipur and getting around
- Jaipur Junction · Five hours from Delhi on the fast train, four from Agra
- Jaipur Airport · 11 kilometres south at Sanganer, and it has a terminal shaped like a fort gate
- Sindhi Camp · The central bus stand; buses to Agra, Delhi, Pushkar and Udaipur
Cheap eats in Jaipur
Rajasthani cooking was built for a desert: very little water, almost no fresh vegetables, and dishes that keep for days. That is why the staples are dal baati churma — baked wheat balls with lentils and a crushed sweet — and ker sangri, made from desert berries and bean pods that grow wild. Jaipur also invented two street items: the pyaaz kachori and the lassi in a disposable clay cup. Twenty to two hundred rupees.
- Pyaaz kachori · 20 to 40 rupees; eat it hot
- Lassi in a clay cup · Sells out by mid afternoon
- Masala Chowk · A small entry fee, then pay each stall
- Dal baati churma · One plate is a whole meal
- Ker sangri · Nothing in it is fresh, by design
- Laal maas · Few places do it well; not in the old city
- Ghewar · July and August only
- Chokhi Dhani · A show, and a fixed price per head
Museums in Jaipur
There is one ticket decision to make here and it settles the rest: the state composite ticket covers eight monuments for two days, and since two of them alone cost more than the composite, buying it at the first gate is the obvious move. The exception is the City Palace, which is privately run by the royal family and sells its own ticket. Rates were revised on the first of January 2026 and counter prices still vary by source. Verified 10/2026.
- The composite ticket · 1,000 rupees, two days, eight sites. Verified 10/2026
- City Palace · 300 rupees, plus 700 for Chandra Mahal. Verified 10/2026
- Albert Hall Museum · In the composite ticket; lit at night from outside
- Jantar Mantar · UNESCO 2010; take the guide
- Anokhi Museum · Block carvers work on site; closed Monday
- Jawahar Kala Kendra · Free; a building that quotes the city plan
- Amrapali Museum · By appointment; almost unknown
- Mubarak Mahal · In the City Palace ticket
Nature and day trips near Jaipur
Jaipur sits in a gap in the Aravalli range, which is one of the oldest mountain systems on earth and is now worn down to hills — and that geology is why the city is where it is: the hills gave it walls on three sides and a single defensible gap. The consequence today is unusual: there is a leopard reserve inside the municipal boundary, and the hills behind the forts are genuinely wild.
- Jhalana Leopard Reserve · Book a slot; morning and afternoon only
- Galtaji · Do not feed the macaques; hold your bag
- Nahargarh ridge · Open enclosures, not cages; 11 kilometres out
- Sisodia Rani Garden · Gravity-fed fountains; in the composite ticket
- Central Park · Free; the city is there at six and at seven
- Jawahar Circle · Free; Patrika Gate is on its edge
- Chand Baori · 78 kilometres east; combine with Bhangarh
- Pushkar · Strictly vegetarian and alcohol-free
Holy places in Jaipur
Jaipur was founded by a Hindu dynasty that had allied with the Mughals for a century and a half, and the religious architecture shows exactly that: a Krishna temple built inside the palace grounds so the king could see the deity from his own window, a Jain and a Hindu city living in the same bazaars, and spring-fed temple tanks in the hills that predate the city by centuries. Shoes off at all of them.
- Govind Dev Ji Temple · Seven aarti times a day; queues at each
- Galtaji · Free; the macaques will take food
- Birla Mandir · Free; lit at night and open in the evening
- Khole Ke Hanuman Ji · Free food Tuesday and Saturday
- Moti Doongri · The temple is open; the palace never is
- Akshardham · Free; no phones inside
Things to do in Jaipur with kids
- Amber Fort · Ramps, gates, a mirror room and tunnels; go at eight to avoid the heat
- Jantar Mantar · Instruments you walk on and climb; take the guide, it is the difference
- Jhalana safari · An open jeep inside the city; a high chance of seeing a leopard
- Nahargarh Biological Park · Large enclosures on the ridge, and there is a lion safari section
- Wax Museum · Inside Nahargarh, with a room entirely lined in mirror mosaic
- Central Park · Free, a huge lawn, and the only real space to run in the city
- Anokhi Museum · They let children print a block themselves and keep it
- Masala Chowk · Street food on a clean licensed site; no calculation needed
Nightlife in Jaipur
Jaipur is not a late city — the bazaars close around nine, alcohol is largely confined to hotels and a small number of licensed bars, and the monuments shut at sunset. What the evening is instead is specific and good: Nahargarh at sunset over the whole grid, a cinema that is itself a monument, the forts lit from below, and in January a literature festival that fills the city.
- Sunset at Nahargarh · Open later than the others; the road down is slow
- Amber night viewing · About 18:30 to 21:15. Verified 10/2026
- Raj Mandir · Buy the ticket an hour ahead; it fills
- Albert Hall at night · Free; the lawn stays open
- Bars on MI Road · Hotel bars; nothing very late
- Jaipur Literature Festival · January; room prices triple that week
Frequently asked questions about Jaipur
What is there to see in Jaipur?
The top sights in Jaipur are The Pink City, Hawa Mahal and Jantar Mantar. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.
How many days do you need in Jaipur?
Three to four days are enough to see the best of Jaipur without rushing, including at least one walking tour.
Is there a free walking tour in Jaipur?
Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Jaipur, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: The city that was drawn before it was built.
How do you get to Jaipur and get around?
The main ways are Jaipur Junction, Jaipur Airport and Sindhi Camp. Full details are in the transport section on this page.
Where to stay in Jaipur, and for how much?
sleepntrip shows only rooms in Jaipur that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.
Looking for a hotel in Jaipur for your dates?
Only rooms that meet nine conditions, up to $80 a night.