Four days in Hyderabad: the city that sold the world its diamonds

The airport is thirty-five kilometres south, on a fast expressway, and takes about forty-five minutes. Drop the bags and go straight to the old city, which is at its best from four in the afternoon onwards.

The Charminar was built in 1591 to mark the founding of the city, at the point where two roads crossed, and it is still exactly that: four arches, four minarets nearly fifty metres high, and a permanently gridlocked junction all round it. You can climb it, and the view down the four streets is the reason to.

A hundred metres away is the great mosque, begun in 1617 and finished under Aurangzeb three quarters of a century later, with granite pillars each cut from a single block and a courtyard that holds several thousand people. The bricks in the central arch are said to be made with soil brought from Mecca.

Then the bangle market on the western side, which sells almost nothing but bangles: lacquer, glass and stone, in ranks, for a couple of hundred metres. It is where Hyderabad shops for weddings and it is best after dark.

Everything today is within a kilometre and a half of yesterday, and it is the day that explains the city.

Start at the palace complex the Asaf Jahi dynasty used for ceremonial business: four courtyards in a row, a durbar hall with a marble platform and nineteen Belgian chandeliers, and a garage of vintage cars including a canary-yellow Rolls-Royce from 1911. It was restored over most of a decade and it is the best-presented building in the city.

Five minutes away, a Shia mourning hall of 1594 holds some of the finest Persian enamel tilework outside Iran, in a building most visitors to the Charminar walk straight past.

Give the afternoon to the museum by the river. It is built on the collection of one man, a prime minister of Hyderabad who spent decades buying whatever he liked from everywhere, and the result is a jumble of Mughal daggers, Chinese porcelain, European marble and Persian carpets that has no organising principle and is completely absorbing. Two things draw a crowd: a Victorian statue of a veiled woman carved so the veil looks transparent, and a British musical clock in which a toy blacksmith strikes a gong on the hour.

A car for the whole day, and start early. The fort is eleven kilometres west, on a granite hill above the plain, and it was the Qutb Shahi capital before the city below existed. What survives is a kilometre of hillside covered in gates, granaries, armouries, mosques, palaces and cisterns, with a citadel at the top and a very long climb to it.

The famous trick is acoustic. Clap your hands under the dome of the outer gatehouse and the sound carries clearly to the top of the citadel, which was the alarm system. Guides will demonstrate it repeatedly and it works.

Allow three hours, take water, and go up before eleven; there is no shade on the steps and about four hundred of them.

Afterwards, the royal necropolis a kilometre north, where the sultans of Golconda are buried under domes in a walled garden. Seven of the tombs are complete, the whole site was restored over about a decade, and there are usually more parakeets in it than people. Then come back to the fort at dusk for the light and sound show, which is exactly as ripe as you would expect and worth staying for.

Two last buildings, both in the old city, both mostly empty of visitors, and both on the way south to the airport.

The first is the Nizams' own residence rather than their ceremonial palace, now a museum of the gifts presented to the seventh Nizam on his silver jubilee. The object everyone comes for is the wardrobe: a two-storey walk-in cupboard about seventy metres long, with a hand-operated wooden lift to get between the levels, built for a man who was said never to wear the same thing twice.

The second is a walled compound of tombs belonging to the noble family that married into the Nizams, built about two hundred years ago in lime and stucco. The screens are cut in geometric patterns that repeat nowhere else, no two panels the same, and there is rarely anybody there but the caretaker.

Then the expressway south, and forty-five minutes to the airport.