You don't just visit Delhi: you survive it, savour it and, in the end, love it. It's one of those cities that overwhelms you at first — the crowds, the honking horns, the smell of incense mixed with smoke and spices, the cows wandering among the cars — and then stays with you. In a single day you can pray in a 17th-century Mughal mosque, get lost in a bazaar where there isn't room to breathe, drink chai at a street stall, walk through a marble mausoleum that inspired the Taj Mahal and finish on an imperial avenue laid out by the British. Capital of empires for more than a thousand years, Delhi is the gateway to India and the starting point of the famous Golden Triangle.
That's because Delhi is really many cities layered on top of each other. Historians talk about the 'seven (or more) cities of Delhi': each dynasty that ruled it — Turkic and Afghan sultans, Mughal emperors, the British Raj — built its own capital, and their ruins, tombs and fortresses are still scattered across the whole area. Old Delhi is the walled city founded by Emperor Shah Jahan (the same one behind the Taj Mahal) in the 17th century, packed around the Red Fort and the great Jama Masjid mosque. New Delhi is the broad, green, monumental city that Lutyens designed for the British Empire, with India Gate and the seats of government.
This guide brings order to that fascinating chaos with a practical, warm approach: which monuments you can't miss and what they cost to enter, how to get around by metro and rickshaw without stress, where to eat the best street food in northern India without getting sick, and how to handle your first days on the subcontinent without feeling overwhelmed. Delhi rewards travellers who lower their expectations of comfort and raise their capacity for wonder: if you're willing to take on its intensity, you'll get the best possible introduction to an India that is ancient and modern at the same time.
Delhi is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world and has been the capital of empires for more than a millennium. Legend links it to Indraprastha from the epic poem Mahabharata, but its recorded history begins with the Muslim sultans who, from the 12th century onwards, made it the capital of the Delhi Sultanate. The Qutub Minar dates from that period: the towering stone minaret that marks the start of Islamic rule in northern India. Then came the Mughals, the dynasty of Turco-Mongol origin that ruled much of the subcontinent between the 16th and 19th centuries. Emperor Humayun lies in the majestic mausoleum that bears his name, and it was Shah Jahan who, in the 17th century, moved the capital from Agra and founded Shahjahanabad — today's Old Delhi — with the Red Fort and the Jama Masjid mosque at its heart. After the Mughal decline and the bloody rebellion of 1857, the British ruled India and, in 1911, decided to move the capital from Calcutta to Delhi. The architect Edwin Lutyens designed New Delhi, the imperial city of avenues and gardens inaugurated in 1931. In 1947, with independence and the traumatic Partition of India and Pakistan, Delhi became the capital of the new republic and took in hundreds of thousands of refugees. The full story of Delhi's 'seven cities', from the sultans to Gandhi, is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The historic heart of power in India: Delhi, capital of sultans, Mughals and the Raj; Agra and its Taj Mahal; and Jaipur, the pink city that completes the classic Golden Triangle.
Read the history of The North and the Golden Triangle →If you only have one day, take a guided tour on the first one: it sets up the rest of your trip and saves you a lot of walking. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have 16 activities in Delhi. And there are free tours here: you book without paying and tip the guide whatever you think at the end, so trying one costs you nothing. Three are below so you get the idea: tap any of them and they all open.
If you book from here we earn a commission and you pay no more. Prices and availability come from Civitatis.
No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Few cities in the world carry as much accumulated history as Delhi. It is often called 'the city of seven cities' (some count more), because over the centuries different dynasties built their own capital here, again and again, on the ruins of the one before. The result is a landscape scattered with fortresses, tombs, mosques and stepwells tucked in among the modern neighbourhoods: walking around Delhi, you literally stumble over a thousand years of empires.
Hindu tradition links the origin of Delhi to Indraprastha, the legendary capital of the Pandavas, the heroes of the great epic poem the Mahabharata, said to have stood on the banks of the Yamuna more than three thousand years ago. There is no firm archaeological evidence of that mythical city, but the story shows how much meaning this bend in the river has carried since time immemorial. What is documented is that, between the 8th and 12th centuries, the area was ruled by Hindu dynasties such as the Tomaras and the Chauhans, who built the region's first citadels (such as Lal Kot and Qila Rai Pithora), and remains of their walls still survive.
Delhi held an extraordinary strategic position: the point where the fertile plains of the Ganges meet the routes coming down from the northwest, the way both trade and invaders came in. Whoever controlled Delhi controlled the gateway to northern India. That role as a hinge explains why so many empires fought over it for more than a millennium.
The great turning point came at the end of the 12th century. In 1192, the Central Asian warrior Muhammad of Ghor defeated the Hindu king Prithviraj Chauhan at the Battle of Tarain, and his general Qutb ud-Din Aibak took Delhi. In 1206, Aibak, a former military slave of Turkic origin, proclaimed himself sultan and founded the Delhi Sultanate, the first great Muslim state in northern India, which would dominate the region for more than three centuries. To celebrate the victory, Aibak began building the Qutub Minar, the towering stone minaret that still rises in the south of the city today, and the Quwwat-ul-Islam, India's first mosque, built with the remains of demolished Hindu and Jain temples.
The Sultanate saw five successive dynasties (the Slave, Khalji, Tughlaq, Sayyid and Lodi dynasties) in a constant swing between splendour, palace intrigue, assassinations and wars. Some sultans were extraordinary and controversial figures: Ala ud-Din Khalji, who repelled the Mongol invasions and created a sophisticated price-control system; or Muhammad bin Tughluq, a brilliant and erratic ruler who went as far as forcibly moving the entire population of Delhi to a new capital in the south, on the Deccan, with catastrophic results. Each dynasty left its own walled city (Siri, Tughlaqabad, Jahanpanah, Firozabad), adding layers to the palimpsest that is Delhi.
In 1398, the city suffered one of the worst catastrophes in its history: the Turco-Mongol conqueror Tamerlane (Timur) sacked it and massacred much of its population. The Sultanate never fully recovered and fell into decline, divided and weakened, until at the beginning of the 16th century a new player appeared on the scene who would change the history of India forever: the Mughals.
In 1526, Prince Babur, a descendant of Tamerlane and Genghis Khan, defeated the last Lodi sultan at the Battle of Panipat and founded the Mughal Empire, the dynasty that would rule much of the Indian subcontinent for more than three centuries and take art, architecture and power to their peak. His son Humayun lost and regained the throne over an eventful life, and died in Delhi in 1556 after falling down the stairs of his library. His widow had the magnificent Humayun's Tomb built for him, the first great Mughal garden mausoleum, which would serve as the model for the future Taj Mahal.
For much of the 16th and 17th centuries, the Mughal capital was in Agra or Lahore, but in 1638 Emperor Shah Jahan (the same man who had built the Taj Mahal in Agra in memory of his wife Mumtaz Mahal) decided to move the court to Delhi and found a new imperial city: Shahjahanabad, today's Old Delhi. Between 1638 and 1648 he had the colossal Red Fort (Lal Qila) built on the banks of the Yamuna as his residence and seat of power, and soon afterwards the great Jama Masjid mosque, the largest in India. The walled city, with its great commercial artery of Chandni Chowk, became one of the richest and most populous cities in the world dazzling centre of art, trade and refinement.
But Mughal splendour began to crack in the 18th century. After the death of the stern Emperor Aurangzeb in 1707, the empire was weakened by internal wars and outside pressure. In 1739, the Persian conqueror Nadir Shah invaded Delhi, plundered it brutally for days (tens of thousands are said to have died) and carried off legendary treasures such as the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor diamond. From then on, the Mughal emperors were little more than figureheads, while real power fragmented and a new European power advanced from the east: the British East India Company.
In 1857 the great Indian Rebellion broke out (called the 'Sepoy Mutiny' by the British and the First War of Independence by Indians), an uprising of Indian soldiers in the Company's army that spread across the north of the country. The rebels took Delhi and proclaimed the elderly and by then almost powerless Bahadur Shah Zafar emperor. He was the last Mughal, more poet than ruler. The British crackdown was ferocious: after a bloody siege they retook the city, plundered it, executed thousands of people and exiled Bahadur Shah Zafar to Burma, where he died. With him, after more than three centuries, the Mughal dynasty came to an end. The British Crown dissolved the Company and took over direct rule of India: the British Raj was born.
For decades the capital of the Raj was Calcutta, but in 1911, at a grand ceremony (the Delhi Durbar) presided over by King George V, the British announced that the capital would move to Delhi, with all its imperial prestige. They then commissioned a brand-new city next to old Shahjahanabad: New Delhi, designed by the architects Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker with wide tree-lined avenues, roundabouts, gardens and grand government buildings. The monumental Rajpath, the Viceroy's residence (now Rashtrapati Bhavan) on Raisina Hill and India Gate, a memorial to the Indian soldiers who died in the First World War, are its legacy. New Delhi was officially inaugurated in 1931.
While the British were building their imperial capital, the Indian independence movement was growing, led by the Indian National Congress and above all by Mohandas Gandhi, the apostle of nonviolent resistance. The streets of Delhi saw protests, civil disobedience campaigns and a slow but unstoppable march towards freedom, which would arrive, at a tragic cost, in the middle of the 20th century.
On 15 August 1947, India finally won its independence from the United Kingdom, and from the walls of the Red Fort Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru raised the new country's flag in a deeply emotional ceremony, a gesture repeated every year on Independence Day. Delhi became the capital of the new republic. But freedom came with one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century: the Partition of the British Raj into two states, India (Hindu-majority) and Pakistan (Muslim-majority), set off a mass exodus and horrific sectarian violence. Millions of people crossed the new borders in both directions and hundreds of thousands died in massacres. Delhi took in a flood of Hindu and Sikh refugees fleeing the Punjab, while many of the city's Muslims left for Pakistan; Delhi's make-up and character changed forever.
A few months later, on 30 January 1948, Mahatma Gandhi was shot dead in Delhi by a Hindu extremist who resented his defence of coexistence with Muslims. He was cremated on the banks of the Yamuna, at the spot that is now the Raj Ghat memorial. His death shook the world and left a deep wound in the young nation.
Since then, Delhi has grown at a dizzying pace to become one of the largest urban areas on the planet, with more than thirty million people in its metropolitan area. It is the political centre of the world's largest democracy, home to Parliament, the government and diplomatic life, and an economic and cultural engine for the country. The Delhi of the 21st century combines skyscrapers, a modern metro system and a thriving middle class with ancient temples, centuries-old bazaars and huge inequalities; it also faces serious challenges, such as air pollution, that often place it among the most polluted cities in the world. And yet, after more than a thousand years of layered empires, it is still the historic, beating heart of India: a city that never stops reinventing itself on the ruins of all the cities it once was.
