There is something of a mirage about Jaisalmer: after hours crossing the Thar Desert, through sand and scrub, a whole honey-coloured city suddenly appears on the horizon, crowned by a fortress with golden walls that seems to rise out of the sand. This is 'the golden city', the most remote and evocative of Rajasthan's jewels, a caravan port in the middle of nowhere that grew rich on trade and left behind a legacy of carved stone of astonishing delicacy. At sunset, when the setting sun lights up the yellow sandstone, all of Jaisalmer seems made of gold.
Its great treasure is Jaisalmer Fort, the Sonar Quila ('golden fortress'), one of the few 'living' forts left in the world: inside its 12th-century walls there are not just monuments but an inhabited neighbourhood, with houses, exquisite Jain temples, shops, hotels and families who have lived there for generations. Around and below it, in the city, spread the havelis: merchants' mansions covered in carvings so fine that the stone looks like lace. And beyond the walls the Thar Desert begins, with its golden dunes, its villages, its camels and its starry nights.
This guide helps you make the most of Jaisalmer: how to visit the living fort (and the debate about sleeping inside it), which havelis you can't miss, how to choose and enjoy a camel safari across the Thar without falling into traps, where to eat and sleep, and which excursions are worth it. Jaisalmer rewards travellers who get lost in its golden alleys, who climb onto a camel to watch the sunset over the dunes and who sleep under a desert sky thick with stars: the perfect —and most adventurous— finale to a trip through Rajasthan.
Jaisalmer was founded in 1156 by Rawal Jaisal, a Rajput ruler of the Bhati clan, who moved his capital to Trikuta Hill, deep in the Thar Desert, and built Jaisalmer Fort there to control the trade routes. For centuries, the city prospered as a key stop for the caravans that crossed the desert linking India with Central Asia, Persia and Arabia: spices, silk, opium, ivory and other goods passed through here, and the wealthy merchants who grew rich from that trade built the splendid carved havelis that still amaze visitors today. The Bhati clan withstood sieges and lived through tragic episodes of jauhar (collective self-immolation in the face of defeat), like the rest of the Rajputs. Decline came with the fading of the overland routes: when trade shifted to sea transport (above all after the rise of the port of Bombay/Mumbai) and, later, with the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, which closed the nearby border and cut the old routes to the west, Jaisalmer was left isolated and almost forgotten. Its revival came from two directions: its strategic military importance due to the nearby border (there is a large army and air base) and, above all, tourism, which rediscovered this desert jewel. The full story of the Bhati clan, the caravans and the desert is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The land of the Rajputs, the warrior caste that raised colossal fortresses in the Thar Desert: blue Jodhpur, romantic Udaipur of the lakes and golden Jaisalmer among the dunes.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Jaisalmer was born of a strategic decision made in the middle of the Thar Desert. Its founder was Rawal Jaisal, head of the Bhati Rajput clan, a warrior lineage that claimed descent from Krishna and from the ancient rulers of the region. Around 1156, Jaisal decided to move his capital from the old and vulnerable fortress of Lodhruva to a far more defensible site: Trikuta hill, a triangular rise overlooking the surrounding sandy plains. There he built the fort that would become the seed of the city and would bear his name: Jaisalmer, 'the fortified hill of Jaisal'.
The choice was no accident. Trikuta hill offered a high position that was easy to defend in open terrain, and it sat on one of the great trade routes that crossed the desert, linking India with Central Asia, Persia, Arabia and Egypt. Extremely valuable goods travelled along these caravan routes —spices, silk, opium, ivory, dates, horses—, and whoever controlled a crossing point could levy taxes and grow rich. Jaisalmer soon became a key stop for the camel caravans crossing the Thar.
And so, in the middle of an arid and hostile landscape, a fortress city rose, built entirely from the local yellow sandstone, a stone that glows gold at sunset and would earn Jaisalmer its nickname of 'the Golden City'. The Bhati clan would rule its desert kingdom for nearly eight centuries, until Indian independence.
For centuries, Jaisalmer lived its golden age thanks to the caravan trade. Located on the route connecting the Indian subcontinent with Central Asia and the Middle East, the city prospered by charging tolls and taxes on camel caravans loaded with precious goods, and as a trading hub where spices, textiles, opium, ivory and other goods were bought and sold. Jaisalmer's merchants grew enormously rich, and with that wealth they sponsored an extraordinary flowering of art and architecture.
The most visible legacy of that prosperity are the havelis, the lavish mansions the merchants built between the 18th and 19th centuries. Covered in incredibly fine carvings in the golden sandstone —projecting balconies, pierced lattice screens, cornices and windows that look like stone lace—, havelis such as Patwon ki Haveli (the largest, built by a family of brocade and opium merchants), Salim Singh or Nathmal are masterpieces that show how far the art of the local stonemasons went. The whole city, with its fort, temples and honey-coloured stone mansions, became a jewel of the desert.
Jaisalmer was also an important centre of Jainism, the ancient Indian religion of non-violence, widespread among merchant communities. Wealthy Jain merchants built a splendid group of seven temples inside the fort between the 12th and 15th centuries, the high point of the art of sandstone carving, along with libraries holding centuries-old manuscripts. That blend of trade, art and spirituality defined the identity of the Golden City at its height.
Jaisalmer's wealth also made it a target, and its history, like that of every Rajput kingdom, is marked by wars, sieges and tragic episodes. In the 13th and 14th centuries, the city suffered several devastating sieges by the armies of the Delhi Sultanate. According to tradition, on at least two of those occasions, faced with certain defeat, the Bhati carried out the terrible Rajput ritual of jauhar and saka: the women immolated themselves together in the fire to avoid dishonour and slavery, while the men, dressed in saffron, rode out to fight to the death. These episodes, among the bloodiest in the history of Rajput honour, remained etched in the city's memory.
With the rise of the Mughal Empire in the 16th century, the rulers of Jaisalmer, like most Rajput kingdoms, ended up making terms with the power in Delhi. They established relations with the Mughal emperors, sometimes through marriage alliances, which brought a long period of stability and allowed trade and the arts to keep flourishing. Under that relative peace, many of the great havelis were built and the city's splendour was consolidated.
Isolated in its desert, far from the great centres of power, Jaisalmer managed for centuries to keep remarkable autonomy and a very distinct identity, protected by distance, sand and the golden walls of its fort, which never stopped dominating the Thar horizon.
Jaisalmer's decline came not through war but through a shift in world trade routes. From the 18th century and, above all, under British rule in the 19th, international trade moved more and more from overland caravans to sea transport. The rise of the great coastal ports, such as Bombay (Mumbai) and Karachi, meant the old caravan routes across the desert lost their importance. The caravans that had made Jaisalmer rich for centuries gradually disappeared, and with them its source of prosperity. The city began to grow poorer and fall behind.
The final blow came with Indian independence and the Partition of 1947. The creation of Pakistan drew a new international border a few kilometres from Jaisalmer, cutting off at the root the old trade routes that linked the region with the west (towards Sindh and beyond). From a crossroads between civilisations, Jaisalmer became a dead end, a remote border town in a corner of the desert, isolated and almost forgotten. Like the rest of the Rajput princely states, the Bhati kingdom joined the Indian Union, and the maharawals lost their political power.
For decades, Jaisalmer languished, and its splendid havelis and golden fort were at risk of decaying through neglect. It seemed the Golden City was doomed to fade slowly into the sands of the Thar. But two unexpected factors would give it a new life.
Jaisalmer's revival came from two very different directions. The first was military: the wars between India and Pakistan (especially those of 1965 and 1971) highlighted the strategic importance of this border town, which became a key base for the Indian army and air force. The arrival of garrisons, along with roads, water and railways improved for defence reasons, partly revived the area's economy and connectivity.
The second, and more transformative, was tourism. From the last decades of the 20th century, travellers from all over the world rediscovered this forgotten jewel of the desert: its 'living' golden fort, its carved havelis, its Jain temples and, above all, the chance to head into the Thar Desert on camel safaris and sleep under the stars. Jaisalmer became one of the most romantic and evocative destinations in Rajasthan, and tourism became its main economic engine, providing work for safari operators, hotels, artisans and shops.
That revival also brings its tensions. The most serious affects Jaisalmer Fort itself: as one of the few forts in the world still inhabited, the arrival of modern running water and the spread of hotels and restaurants inside its walls have caused leaks that damage the sandstone foundations, with bastions collapsing. That is why heritage organisations ask visitors not to stay inside the fort, to reduce water use and save it. Today, the Golden City faces the challenge of living off tourism without destroying what makes it unique: finding the balance between the flow of travellers, the lives of its residents and the conservation of that honey-coloured fortress which, eight and a half centuries after Rawal Jaisal, still lights up gold every sunset over the sands of the Thar.
