Four days in Delhi: every empire built here, and none of them tidied up

Three nights, four days and one metro card. Mughal Old Delhi, the medieval ruins twenty kilometres south, and the imperial grid the British left behind.

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Length
4 days, 3 nights
Where you stay
Delhi
Places
11 across 4 days
OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles Data from OpenStreetMap

Delhi is usually described as a stack of cities rather than one, and the count depends on who is doing it. Each conqueror built a new capital a few kilometres from the last and left the previous one where it stood, so the ruins were never cleared and the city grew around them. A fourteenth-century tomb sits inside a roundabout. A Lodi stepwell is at the end of a lane of office blocks.

That is the whole appeal, and it is also why Delhi frustrates people who arrive expecting a centre. There is not one. There are several, twenty kilometres apart, and the metro between them is excellent.

Four days is enough for the three that matter: Shahjahanabad in the north, the medieval ruins in the south, and the imperial capital the British dropped in the middle in the 1910s.

Highlights

  • Humayun's Tomb, the building the Taj Mahal was refined from, and a restored Mughal garden beside it
  • Qawwali at a Sufi shrine on a Thursday evening, at the end of a lane two people wide
  • The Red Fort and the largest mosque in India, ten minutes' walk apart
  • A 73 metre minaret begun in 1199, and an iron pillar next to it that has not rusted in sixteen centuries
  • Twenty-seven marble petals, and the only enforced silence in Delhi

Where to stay

Delhi, three nights

Where you stay changes the trip more here than in most cities, because the distances are real. Central Delhi, around Connaught Place or towards Nizamuddin, keeps you on the metro and roughly equidistant from the Mughal city in the north and the ruins in the south. Hauz Khas and Saket are quieter and greener but a long way from Old Delhi.

Paharganj, opposite New Delhi station, is where the cheap hotels are and it is exactly what its reputation says: loud, dirty, convenient, and fine if you know what you are getting.

Four days sounds like a lot for a city break and is not. Two of these days involve twenty kilometres of travel each, and the free hours are what make that bearable.

Day by day

Day 1 in Delhi

Humayun's Tomb, a restored Mughal garden and qawwali at Nizamuddin

One corner of the city, and the best possible introduction to the rest of it. Everything today is within a kilometre of everything else, which after a long flight is the point.

Humayun's Tomb was built in the 1560s by the emperor's widow, and it is the first of the great Mughal garden tombs: a red sandstone platform, a white marble dome, and a walled garden quartered by water channels. Every Mughal tomb after it, including the Taj Mahal, is a variation on this. It spent most of the twentieth century neglected and was brought back over a decade of restoration, which is why the stonework looks new.

Next door is a sixteenth-century garden that was a colonial plant nursery for most of the last century and is now a public park with Mughal tombs scattered through it. It is the best green space in Delhi and almost nobody outside the city knows about it.

In the evening, walk into the Nizamuddin basti. A lane barely two people wide, lined with kebab counters and shops selling rose petals and prayer caps, leads to the marble shrine of a Sufi saint who died in 1325. On Thursday evenings the qawwali singers perform after sunset and the courtyard fills to the walls.

  1. 10:00

    Humayun's Tomb

    Historic

    One of Delhi's three UNESCO sites, and the template for everything Mughal that came after. Walk out to the corners of the platform rather than stopping at the front; the garden was laid out to be read from there.

  2. 13:00

    Sunder Nursery

    Leisure

    Ninety acres of restored Mughal garden and heritage trees next to the tomb, with a lake, a bird area and a dozen monuments in it. Free early in the morning, ticketed later, and worth an hour in either case.

  3. 18:00

    Hazrat Nizamuddin Dargah

    Religious

    The tomb of Khwaja Nizamuddin Auliya, with the poet Amir Khusrau buried a few metres away. Shoes off at the entrance to the lane, heads covered, cash for the shoe stand. Thursday is the night to come.

With more time: Khan Market and the Lodi Colony murals are ten minutes west and are the easiest way to see the other Delhi: bookshops, coffee, embassies and a great deal of money. Lodi Gardens next to them holds fifteenth-century tombs in a public park where people are jogging past them.

Day 2 in Delhi

Old Delhi: the fort, the great mosque and Chandni Chowk

Shahjahanabad was founded in 1638 and finished ten years later, and the plan has barely changed since. A fort on the river, a great mosque on a rock south of it, and a market street running west from the fort gate with a canal down the middle. The canal is gone. Everything else is where it was.

Start at the fort at opening. It is enormous, mostly empty, and the pleasure is in the marble pavilions along the eastern wall rather than the ramparts everybody photographs. Not on a Monday, when it is shut.

Then the mosque, ten minutes south, up a flight of red sandstone steps that are a market in themselves. And then let Chandni Chowk have the afternoon. Do not take a car in. The metro drops you at the top of the street and beyond that it is your feet or a cycle rickshaw, and the rickshaw is worth it for the ride alone.

Opposite the fort gate stands the oldest Jain temple in the city, and behind it a hospital that treats injured birds and nothing else. Both are free and neither takes long.

  1. 09:30

    Red Fort

    Other

    Shah Jahan's capital fort, closed Mondays, and worth two hours. The covered bazaar just inside the gate has been selling to visitors since the 1650s and is the only surviving Mughal shopping arcade in India.

  2. 12:30

    Jama Masjid

    Religious

    The largest mosque in India, with a courtyard that takes twenty-five thousand people. There is a camera fee and a separate charge to climb the southern minaret, and nobody is obliged to hire a guide however firmly they are told otherwise.

  3. 14:30

    Lunch on Chandni Chowk

    Eat

    One lane fries nothing but parathas, another does jalebi in a pan the size of a table, and the lassi comes thick enough to need a spoon. Follow the queue rather than the sign.

  4. 16:30

    Sri Digambar Jain Lal Mandir

    Religious

    The oldest Jain temple in Delhi, red sandstone, directly opposite the fort. The bird hospital in the same compound takes in several thousand injured birds a year and is open to visitors.

With more time: Khari Baoli at the western end of the street is the biggest wholesale spice market in Asia, and the smell of it carries two lanes in every direction. Kinari Bazaar, off to the north, sells nothing but wedding trim: gold thread, sequins, turbans and garlands made of banknotes.

Day 3 in Delhi

The oldest Delhi, a Lodi stepwell and a lotus in marble

South today, and back six hundred years before yesterday. The first Muslim capital in India was built here in the 1190s on the ruins of a Hindu citadel, and it is a metro ride from the middle of the modern city.

The minaret is the famous part, seventy-three metres of fluted red sandstone begun in 1199 and finished by successive sultans over the following century and a half. The mosque beside it was put up from the material of demolished temples, which you can read directly in the carved columns of the courtyard. And in the middle of that courtyard stands an iron pillar from around the fifth century that has not rusted, for reasons metallurgists are still writing papers about.

The archaeological park behind it gets a fraction of the visitors and holds a stepwell of the early 1500s: three storeys of arcaded steps going down into the ground, with a mosque and a tomb beside it and usually nobody there.

Finish across the city at the Bahá'í house of worship, which is twenty-seven marble petals in the shape of a lotus bud, finished in 1986. It is open to anyone of any faith, and silence is enforced inside, which after a day in Delhi traffic turns out to be the actual attraction.

  1. 09:30

    Qutub Minar

    Other

    The tallest brick minaret in the world, in a complex with almost no shade. Go at opening; by eleven the stone is throwing the heat straight back at you.

  2. 12:30

    Rajon ki Baoli

    Other

    A stepwell built by Daulat Khan under Sikandar Lodi, in the archaeological park five minutes' walk from the minaret. Free, unstaffed, and one of the quietest places in Delhi.

  3. 16:00

    Bahá'í Lotus Temple

    Religious

    Twenty-seven petals over nine pools, finished in 1986 and among the most visited buildings on earth. Closed Mondays. Allow half an hour of queue and ten minutes of silence.

With more time: Hauz Khas, between the two, wraps a fourteenth-century reservoir, madrasa and tomb in a village full of bars and design shops. It is the one place in Delhi where the ruins have a cocktail list next to them, and the deer park behind is a good walk at dusk.

Day 4 in Delhi

A free kitchen, a war memorial and the flight home

New Delhi on the last morning, which is the newest layer and the easiest to reach on the way to the airport.

Start at the main Sikh gurdwara, a white and gold building with a tank in front of it that runs a free kitchen serving tens of thousands of meals a day, cooked and washed up by volunteers. Anyone can eat and anyone can help. Cover your head, leave your shoes, and go and look at the kitchen: the pans are the size of bathtubs.

Then the ceremonial avenue, with a memorial arch to the Indian soldiers who died in the First World War standing at the eastern end of it and more than thirteen thousand names cut into the stone. The lawns either side are where Delhi comes in the evening, but at nine in the morning it is empty and the light is better.

The airport is about forty minutes from there, and the metro express does it in twenty.

  1. 08:00

    Gurudwara Bangla Sahib

    Other

    The main gurdwara of Delhi, open at any hour, free, and the most generous place in the city. Sit in the langar hall and eat with everybody else; there is no charge and no expectation.

  2. 10:00

    India Gate

    Historic

    A 42 metre arch at the end of a two kilometre avenue, with the names of more than 13,000 soldiers on it. Ten minutes to look at, and better on foot from the far end than from a car.

  3. 12:00

    To Indira Gandhi International

    Travel

    Forty minutes by road, twenty on the airport express from New Delhi station. Both are fine; the road can double at rush hour and the train cannot.

With more time: If the flight is late, the national museum on Janpath is ten minutes away and holds the Harappan collection, including a bronze dancing girl from around 2500 BC. The labelling is poor and the objects are extraordinary.

Before you go

When to go

October to March. February and March are the best of it: warm days, cool evenings and clear light. April to June regularly passes 43 degrees, and the monsoon in July and August is humid rather than cooling.

The catch is winter air. From about early November to late January Delhi's smog is genuinely bad, sometimes bad enough to grey out a building from two hundred metres. If you are asthmatic, come in February or wait until October.

Getting around

The metro, and it is not close. It is clean, air-conditioned, cheap, and it reaches almost everything on this list including the Qutub Minar and the airport. Buy a tourist card for unlimited travel or a stored-value card at any station. The front carriage of every train is reserved for women.

For the last kilometre, use a ride-hailing app rather than negotiating with an auto driver at a monument gate. Both apps here dispatch autos as well as cars, at the meter rate, which removes the entire argument.

Tickets and closing days

The Red Fort closes on Mondays, the Lotus Temple on Mondays, and most government museums on Mondays as well, so do not put the whole trip on a week that starts wrong. Buy tickets for the big monuments online; the foreign-visitor price is ten to twenty times the local one and is the same at the gate.

At religious sites, shoes come off and heads are covered. Gurdwaras lend headscarves at the door and mosques will lend a wrap. Nobody expects you to know in advance, and everybody will tell you.

The touts, and what to actually watch for

Delhi's nuisance is commercial, not criminal. The standard versions: a man at a monument gate insisting a guide is compulsory, a driver who says your hotel has burned down or closed and offers another, and unofficial tourist offices near New Delhi station that will sell you an itinerary at four times the price.

Book accommodation and tickets yourself, get out of any vehicle that is going somewhere you did not ask for, and treat anyone who approaches you first as selling something. That is the whole of it.

The monuments are the reason to come and they are not the thing people describe afterwards. That tends to be the cycle rickshaw ride down Chandni Chowk at four in the afternoon, the smell of the kebab lane at Nizamuddin, or standing in a langar hall being handed food by a stranger.

Four days covers all of it with hours to spare. Delhi will fill them whether you plan it or not.

Or make it a longer trip

These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

Copy to my trips

Common questions

Is four days enough for Delhi?
For the three historic layers, yes. Delhi rewards longer, and a week would let you add the crafts museum, the big modern temples across the river, Mehrauli properly and a day trip to Agra, but four days covers everything most people come for.
Where should I stay in Delhi?
Central, near Connaught Place or Nizamuddin, if you want to be equidistant from Old Delhi and the southern ruins and on the metro for both. South Delhi is greener and quieter but adds an hour a day to this itinerary.
Is Delhi safe?
For ordinary travel, yes, with the usual big-city care. Women travelling alone should expect more staring and comment than in most Indian cities and are generally better off with ride-hailing apps than street autos after dark. The commonest problem for everyone is commercial: touts, fake tourist offices and drivers with commission arrangements.
How bad is the air quality?
Bad from November to January, and occasionally very bad. It is a real consideration rather than a scare story: check the index before you book if you have a respiratory condition. February to April and September to October are much better.
Can I do Agra as a day trip from Delhi?
Yes, and a lot of people do. The first train leaves before dawn and takes about two hours, which gets you to the Taj Mahal early enough to matter, and there are evening trains back. It makes a very long day and it works.
What should I wear?
Shoulders and knees covered at religious sites, which is most of this list, and something to cover your head at gurdwaras and mosques. Otherwise anything comfortable and cotton. Shoes that come off easily save a lot of fumbling.
Can I change this plan?
Yes. Copy it and move the days to fit your flights. Keep the geography: each day here stays in one part of the city, and mixing Old Delhi with the Qutub Minar means two hours in traffic for no reason.