Jakarta: what to see, where to stay and how to get around

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There was a Sundanese port here called Sunda Kelapa, and on 22 June 1527 a commander named Fatahillah took it and renamed it Jayakarta, deed of victory — that date is still the city’s official birthday. In 1619 Jan Pieterszoon Coen of the Dutch East India Company burned Jayakarta to the ground and built Batavia on top of it: a walled Dutch town with canals, gabled houses and a city hall, intended to look like Amsterdam in the tropics. It worked architecturally and failed biologically. The canals bred malaria, the water was filthy, and in some decades more than half of the Europeans who arrived died within a year — Batavia was known across Asia as the graveyard of the East, and by the 1740s the Dutch had begun abandoning it for higher ground to the south. That is why the old town is a separate district five kilometres from the modern centre, and why so much of it is still standing. Two hours, and go before ten: there is no shade on the square.

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A short history of Jakarta

On this site there was a port called Sunda Kelapa, which traded in pepper. In 1527 the commander Fatahillah of the Sultanate of Demak captured it and named it Jayakarta, "complete victory", and the date of the conquest is still regarded as the city's birthday. In 1619 the Dutch under Jan Pieterszoon Coen captured it, named it Batavia, and it became the Asian headquarters of the Dutch East India Company. On 17 August 1945 Indonesia's independence was proclaimed in the city. Jakarta is sinking by several centimetres a year, and in 2022 a law was passed to move the capital to a new city on Borneo, Nusantara.

The ten best sights in Jakarta

1
Kota Tua — the old town
The Dutch Batavia of 1619, built by the VOC on the ruins of the town it destroyed
2
Fatahillah Square
The old town square, named after the man who took the port in 1527 — not after the Dutch who built it
3
Jakarta History Museum
The 1710 city hall; the water cells under it held Prince Diponegoro. 5,000 rupiah, open 09:00–17:00, closed Mondays. Verified 10/2026
4
Wayang Museum
Shadow and rod puppets from across the archipelago, in a building that was a Dutch church twice
5
Museum Bank Indonesia
Free, air conditioned, and the best-presented museum in the city; it was the colonial central bank
6
Museum Bank Mandiri
A 1933 Dutch bank left exactly as it was: ledgers, typewriters, the vault and the staff canteen
7
Museum Seni Rupa dan Keramik
In the 1870 courthouse on the square; Indonesian painting from the colonial academies onward
8
Toko Merah
The red house of 1730, built for a governor-general; teak inside, and one of the oldest buildings left
9
Kota Intan Bridge
A Dutch drawbridge first built in 1628; the only one of its kind left in Asia
10
Gereja Sion
1695, the oldest surviving church in Jakarta, built for freed slaves from the Portuguese colonies

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Batavia: the graveyard of the East

Fatahillah Square · This was the Stadhuisplein, the Dutch city hall square, and the renaming is the whole point: independent Indonesia named it after the man who conquered the port in 1527 and not after the company that built the square in 1710. Public executions were carried out on it, and the colonial practice of using the square for punishment is one reason the building behind it is remembered the way it is. Today it is bicycles for hire, Betawi musicians and schoolchildren on trips.
Jakarta History Museum · The old city hall of 1710, and the part to find is underneath: a row of water cells where prisoners were held standing in sewage. Prince Diponegoro, the Javanese leader of a five-year war against the Dutch that killed around 200,000 people, was held here before being exiled to Sulawesi in 1830 — he had been invited to negotiate and was arrested at the meeting. The upstairs rooms hold the Dutch furniture, which the museum displays without flattery.
Museum Bank Indonesia · The best-presented museum in Jakarta, free, air conditioned, and in the building of the colonial central bank, De Javasche Bank of 1828. It tells the story of money in the archipelago, which turns out to be the story of the archipelago: the spice trade and why the Dutch wanted it, the VOC’s bankruptcy in 1799, the hyperinflation of the 1960s when prices rose six hundred per cent in a year, and the 1998 crisis that brought down Suharto. The marble banking hall alone is worth the walk.
Toko Merah · The red house on the Kali Besar canal, built in 1730 for Gustaaf Willem van Imhoff, later governor-general — and the red brick is original, not paint. Two governors-general lived in it, it became a shop, a hotel and an office, and the teak columns and staircase inside are still the 1730 work. It stands on the canal that was the Dutch answer to a tropical river and the reason so many of them died: the canal silted, stagnated and bred the mosquitoes.
Gereja Sion · Built in 1695 and the oldest church still standing in Jakarta, and it was not built for the Dutch: it was the church of the Mardijkers, Christianised slaves and their descendants whom the Dutch had freed from Portuguese colonies in India and Malacca on condition they convert to Protestantism and serve as soldiers. They spoke a Portuguese creole, and their music is one root of Betawi keroncong. The original ebony pulpit and the copper chandeliers are still inside, and so are around a thousand graves under the floor.
Sunda Kelapa Harbour · The original port, the reason the city exists, and still working — not as a museum. Wooden pinisi schooners, two-masted and built without plans in the boatyards of South Sulawesi, tie up here and are loaded with sawn timber by men carrying it on their shoulders up a plank. It is the largest working sailing cargo fleet left anywhere in the world, and it survives because it is cheaper than steel ships for the islands. Walk in; someone will want a small fee and that is fair.

Merdeka: the city Sukarno built

Indonesia declared independence on 17 August 1945 and had to fight the Dutch for four more years to keep it, and when Sukarno finally had a capital he set about making it look like one. The square the Dutch had called Koningsplein became Medan Merdeka — Freedom Square, a square kilometre of open ground, one of the largest city squares in the world — and around and on it he put a 132-metre monument, the largest mosque in Southeast Asia, a national museum and a palace. It is a deliberate piece of national assertion built by a poor country, and some of it took fifteen years. Two hours, and it is almost entirely in the open with very little shade: do it from four, and the monument stays open into the evening.

Monas · A 132-metre marble obelisk on a square platform, with a bronze flame on top covered in gold leaf — originally 35 kilograms of it, raised to 50 for the fiftieth anniversary of independence in 1995. The shape is not accidental: it is a lingga and yoni, the Hindu-Javanese pairing of male and female principles, which is how Sukarno chose to make a national monument that was Indonesian rather than Western. Construction ran from 1961 to 1975 and he did not live to see it finished. There is a lift to the top and a queue for it.
Istiqlal Mosque · The largest mosque in Southeast Asia, with room for around two hundred thousand people. The design was chosen by open competition in 1955 and won by Frederich Silaban, a Batak architect from North Sumatra — and a Protestant Christian. Sukarno, who chaired the jury, insisted on the result, and the point was explicit: the state mosque of the largest Muslim population on earth was designed by a Christian to demonstrate what the national motto about unity in diversity was supposed to mean. It took until 1978 to finish.
Jakarta Cathedral · A neo-Gothic cathedral of 1901 standing directly opposite the great mosque, and the two institutions have an arrangement that is worth knowing about: the mosque lends the cathedral its car park at Christmas and the cathedral returns the favour at Eid, a practice they have kept up for decades. In 2021 a pedestrian tunnel was begun under the road between them, officially called the tunnel of friendship. In a country where religious tension is real and periodically violent, this particular corner is the counter-example people point at.
The National Museum · Founded in 1778 by a Dutch learned society, which makes it the oldest museum in Southeast Asia, and it is known as the elephant museum because of the bronze elephant outside — a gift from King Chulalongkorn of Siam in 1871, one of the very few monarchs in the region never to be colonised. The collection is the archipelago: Hindu-Buddhist stone sculpture, bronzes, and a treasury of gold. A fire in September 2023 damaged several galleries; check what has reopened before counting on it.
Museum Taman Prasasti · A Dutch cemetery opened in 1795 outside the then city limits, because the churchyards inside Batavia had filled — which tells you the mortality rate better than any figure. It was closed in 1975 and most of the bodies moved, and the city kept it as a museum of its own gravestones. Olivia Mariamne Raffles is buried here: she died of fever in Buitenzorg in 1814, and her husband Thomas Stamford Raffles, who later founded Singapore, put up a memorial to her in the Bogor gardens.
Bundaran HI and Jalan Thamrin · The roundabout with the welcome statue was built for the 1962 Asian Games, and the avenue running south from it is where modern Jakarta decided to be. It is also the city’s political space: the 1998 demonstrations that ended Suharto’s thirty-two years passed along it, and it is still where protests end up. Every Sunday morning both Thamrin and Sudirman are closed to cars for car-free day and the entire city walks, cycles and does aerobics on six lanes of asphalt.

Glodok: the quarter they were sent to

In October 1740 the Dutch administration of Batavia, which had become convinced that the Chinese population was planning a rising, allowed troops and militias to kill the Chinese inside the city walls. In about two weeks somewhere near ten thousand people were killed and the canal that ran through the town ran with bodies; it is remembered in Indonesian as the Chinezenmoord, the Chinese murder. Afterwards the survivors were forbidden to live inside the walls and were resettled in a designated quarter to the south, outside them. That quarter is Glodok, and it is still Jakarta’s Chinatown — which means the geography of this walk is itself the history. Two hours. Go in the morning for the market and come back at seven for the food.

Jin De Yuan Temple · Founded in 1650, which makes it older than the 1740 massacre and the oldest Chinese temple in the city; the main deity is Guanyin. In March 2015 a fire that started from candles destroyed the main hall and most of the statues, and it was rebuilt over several years with donations, which is why the woodwork looks newer than the dates on the plaques. During the Suharto years, from 1967 to 1998, public Chinese religious practice, characters and names were banned by decree, and temples like this survived by registering as Buddhist.
Petak Sembilan · The market lane that runs to the temple gate, and it is the densest and least adapted market in central Jakarta: live frogs, turtles, eels, dried fish, herbs with no English name, and food stalls that have been in the same doorway for three generations. The street name means plot nine, from the Dutch land registry of the resettled quarter — the quarter was laid out in numbered plots, and the number stuck.
Pasar Glodok · The main market building, and its trade tells the quarter’s economic history in one place: traditional Chinese medicine, ginseng and birds’ nests on one floor, mobile phones and computer parts on another. Glodok was for decades the electronics market of Indonesia, and in May 1998, during the riots that brought down Suharto, this district was specifically attacked — shops were looted and burned and over a thousand people died in Jakarta, with Chinese-Indonesians deliberately targeted. The rebuilt shopfronts date from then.
Jalan Pancoran · The old main street of Glodok, and it is worth walking for the shophouses: two storeys, a shop below and the family above, with the shuttered wooden fronts that were standard across Chinese Southeast Asia and have mostly been replaced elsewhere. Several of the businesses on it are over a century old — a coffee roaster, a herbalist, a shop that makes only rice-flour cakes — and they are visibly the same families.
Pasar Pagi Asemka · The wholesale market at the northern edge of Glodok, where the city buys toys, stationery, hair clips, wedding favours and Christmas decorations by the box. It opens around five in the morning and the serious business is over by nine, and prices here are a third of the mall. It sits on the boundary between Glodok and the old Dutch town, which is exactly where a quarter that was built to trade with a city it could not live in would put its market.
Masjid Jami Angke · A mosque of 1761, two kilometres west, and the single most instructive building in Jakarta: the roof is Javanese, the columns and the door frames are Chinese, the proportions and the brickwork are Dutch, and it was reportedly built by a Chinese-Muslim community with Balinese labour. Jakarta is a city whose own ethnic group, the Betawi, is a creole of Malay, Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese, Chinese, Arab and Portuguese ancestry, and this building is that sentence in stone.

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Getting to Jakarta and getting around

Soekarno–Hatta Airport · Twenty-one kilometres west; there is a train to the centre and it beats the toll road every time
Halim Perdanakusuma Airport · The second airport, thirteen kilometres south-east; domestic only, and far quicker to clear
Gambir Station · The main intercity station, beside Monas; Yogyakarta is seven hours and Bandung three
Jakarta Kota Station · The 1929 Art Deco terminus in the old town, by the Dutch architect Ghijsels; still in daily use
Dukuh Atas interchange · Where the MRT, the LRT, the airport train and the commuter rail all meet; the one real hub
Blok M Terminal · The southern end of the first MRT line and the main TransJakarta hub; the busway network is the longest on earth
Sunda Kelapa Harbour · Wooden pinisi schooners still load timber here by hand — the last large working sailing fleet anywhere

Cheap eats in Jakarta

Jakarta does not have a cuisine of its own so much as it has all of them: the city pulls in migrants from every island, and the food of Padang, Java, Sulawesi and Sumatra is all here and all better than at home because the competition is harder. The exception is Betawi food, which is the city’s own — soto Betawi, kerak telor, nasi uduk — and which you have to go looking for. Two rules: a Padang restaurant puts a dozen dishes on your table and you pay only for what you touch, and the best food in this city is sold off a cart after dark. Twenty to sixty thousand rupiah, one and a half to four dollars.

Nasi Padang · A dozen dishes land on the table and you pay for what you touch; three dollars, and rendang is the one
Soto Betawi · Beef soup with coconut milk, tomato and fried shallots; the city’s own dish, two and a half dollars
Kerak telor · A Betawi omelette of duck egg and sticky rice, fried on a cart over a flame. A dollar and a half
Gado-gado and ketoprak · Vegetables, egg and tofu under a peanut sauce pounded to order; a dollar and a half and it is vegetarian
Martabak · Two different things with one name: a stuffed savoury pancake and a thick sweet one. Three dollars
Sate · Ten skewers with peanut sauce and rice cake, two dollars; ayam is chicken and kambing is goat
Nasi uduk · Coconut rice with fried chicken, tempeh and sambal, wrapped in banana leaf; the Betawi breakfast
Es cendol and es teler · Iced coconut-milk drinks with green rice-flour worms or fruit; a dollar and it is what you want at two
Kopi tubruk · Coffee grounds and sugar with boiling water poured on top; you wait for it to settle and do not stir
Pecenongan at midnight · The street that does not open until nine; martabak, seafood and goat satay until three in the morning

Museums in Jakarta

Jakarta’s museums divide into two groups that do not talk to each other: the colonial buildings in the old town, which are about the Dutch and are mostly good, and the state museums of the Sukarno and Suharto eras, which are about the nation and have to be read as documents of the governments that built them. The best two are a bank museum and a bank museum — Bank Indonesia and Bank Mandiri — which is unexpected and true. Most close around three in the afternoon and several shut on Mondays.

Museum Bank Indonesia · Free, air conditioned and genuinely well made; two hours and the best museum in the city
Museum Bank Mandiri · A 1933 Dutch bank left as it was, down to the ledgers and the staff canteen; almost nobody goes
National Museum · The oldest museum in Southeast Asia, 1778; a 2023 fire closed galleries, so check what is open
Wayang Museum · Shadow puppets from across the archipelago; there are performances on Sundays
Museum MACAN · Modern and contemporary art in west Jakarta; the only museum here with a changing programme
Museum Tekstil · Batik and ikat in a colonial villa, with workshops where you wax your own cloth
Lubang Buaya · The 1965 site and the official account of what followed; go knowing that the history is contested

Holy places in Jakarta

Indonesia has the largest Muslim population of any country on earth — around 240 million people — and it is not an Islamic state: the constitution recognises six religions, and the national ideology, Pancasila, requires belief in one God without specifying which. Jakarta has the great mosque and the Catholic cathedral facing each other across one road, Chinese temples that were illegal for thirty years, a Protestant church built for freed slaves and a Hindu minority from Bali. Dress modestly and cover your head in mosques; all of these places are free and most will show you round if you ask.

Istiqlal Mosque · The largest in Southeast Asia; a guide at the gate will take you round free, and it is worth taking
Jakarta Cathedral · 1901, facing the mosque; they lend each other their car parks at Christmas and Eid
Gereja Sion · 1695, the oldest church in the city, built for freed slaves of the Portuguese colonies
Immanuel Church · A domed 1839 Protestant church by Gambir; services are still in Dutch once a month
Jin De Yuan Temple · 1650, the oldest Chinese temple here; Chinese religious practice was banned in public 1967–1998
Masjid Luar Batang · An eighteenth-century shrine mosque in the fishing kampung; a pilgrimage site, and very poor
Masjid Jami Angke · 1761, and Javanese, Chinese and Dutch at once; the most instructive building in Jakarta

Nature and day trips near Jakarta

Jakarta is thirteen metres above sea level at its highest and sinking: parts of the north subside by up to twenty-five centimetres a year because the city pumps its drinking water out of the ground beneath itself, around forty per cent of the land is already below sea level, and a sea wall is being built. That is the official reason the capital is being moved to a new city in Borneo. What this means for a visitor is that there is very little green in the city and a great deal of it an hour or two out: botanical gardens from 1817, a mountain pass at a thousand metres, and a hundred islands two hours offshore.

Bogor Botanical Gardens · Forty-seven kilometres south, 87 hectares and founded 1817; the train from Jakarta takes an hour
Thousand Islands · Around 110 islands, two hours by boat from Ancol; Pramuka and Tidung have guesthouses
Pulau Onrust · A VOC shipyard, then a leper colony, then a hajj quarantine station; ruins, and nobody there
Puncak Pass · Sixty-two kilometres south at a thousand metres, through tea; the road is gridlocked every weekend
Taman Safari Bogor · Drive-through safari on the Puncak road; go on a weekday or do not go at all
Ragunan Zoo · 140 hectares of old trees fifteen kilometres south; cheap, shaded, and crowded on Sundays

Things to do in Jakarta with kids

Jakarta is a mall city for families and that is not a criticism: the pavements are broken or absent, the traffic makes a short walk dangerous, and the malls are where Indonesian families genuinely spend a Sunday. Beyond that the things that work are the big state parks from the Suharto era — Taman Mini and Ancol — which are enormous, cheap and full of local families, and the car-free morning on Thamrin, which is the one time in the week a child can ride a bicycle in central Jakarta.

Taman Mini Indonesia Indah · 150 hectares, a pavilion per province and a cable car over a lake shaped like the archipelago
Ancol and Dunia Fantasi · The waterfront complex: theme park, aquarium, beaches; a whole day and busy at weekends
Sea World Ancol · An aquarium with a walk-through tunnel; indoors, which matters at two in the afternoon
Car-free Sunday on Thamrin · Six lanes closed to traffic from six to eleven; bicycles, skateboards and the whole city out
Ragunan Zoo · Cheap, shaded and enormous; the orangutan enclosure is the one worth queuing for
Planetarium Jakarta · At the arts centre, from 1964, and it is almost free; shows in Indonesian, and book ahead

Nightlife in Jakarta

Jakarta has a serious nightlife and it is almost entirely in the south, in Senopati, Kemang and the SCBD, which means getting to it is a thirty to sixty minute ride from a central hotel and getting home is worse. Alcohol is legal but heavily taxed and therefore expensive — a beer in a bar costs several times what the food costs — and the law and the social temperature on it vary. The other half of the Jakarta night is the food streets, which cost almost nothing and run until three.

Senopati · The restaurant and bar street of south Jakarta; walkable within itself, which is rare
SCBD · The business district with the rooftop bars; expensive, and the view is what you pay for
Kemang · The older expatriate quarter; live music, lower prices and a longer ride to get there
Pecenongan · The late food street in the centre: it opens at nine and runs to three, and costs a fraction
Jalan Sabang · Five minutes from Thamrin and the easiest evening meal on foot from a central hotel
Blok M · At the end of the MRT line; cheap bars, students, and you can get home by train until midnight

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Frequently asked questions about Jakarta

What is there to see in Jakarta?

The top sights in Jakarta are Kota Tua — the old town, Fatahillah Square and Jakarta History Museum. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.

How many days do you need in Jakarta?

Three to four days are enough to see the best of Jakarta without rushing, including at least one walking tour.

Is there a free walking tour in Jakarta?

Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Jakarta, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: Batavia: the graveyard of the East.

How do you get to Jakarta and get around?

The main ways are Soekarno–Hatta Airport, Halim Perdanakusuma Airport and Gambir Station. Full details are in the transport section on this page.

Where to stay in Jakarta, and for how much?

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