Jakarta is not a postcard city, and perhaps that is why it puzzles so many travellers. It is a huge, dense, hot and chaotic megacity, with gleaming skyscrapers alongside working-class neighbourhoods, legendary traffic jams and an energy that never stops. But that is exactly where its interest lies: Jakarta is the best place to understand the real Indonesia, the Indonesia of the 21st century, a country of almost 280 million people and more than a thousand islands that is governed, financed and dreamed up from this seething capital on the shores of the Java Sea.
Beneath the noise there is a lot of history. This was Batavia, the capital of the Dutch East Indies, the heart of the trading empire of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), which controlled the spice trade for centuries. From that era remain the Old Town (Kota Tua), with its colonial buildings around Fatahillah Square, and the old port of Sunda Kelapa, where wooden schooners are still loaded and unloaded by hand. And in the centre, the great obelisk of the National Monument (Monas) celebrates the independence won in 1945.
This guide helps you make the most of a stopover in Jakarta without wasting time or patience: what to see in one or two days, how to get around a city built for cars, where to eat well (street food and dishes like nasi goreng or sate are a world of their own) and how to use it as a springboard to the great destinations of Java. Jakarta is best enjoyed if you take it for what it is: an intense, very human gateway to a fascinating country.
The Jakarta area began as a port called Sunda Kelapa, belonging to the Hindu kingdom of Sunda. In 1527, Muslim troops led by Fatahillah conquered it and renamed it Jayakarta ('city of victory'), the origin of today's name. In 1619 the Dutch East India Company (VOC) razed the city and founded Batavia on its ruins, which for more than three centuries would be the capital of the Dutch East Indies and the centre of the lucrative spice trade, built with Amsterdam-style canals and sustained by slave labour and rigid segregation. After the Japanese occupation in the Second World War, on 17 August 1945 Sukarno and Hatta proclaimed Indonesia's independence here, and the city regained an Indonesian name: Jakarta. As the capital of the new republic, it grew at a dizzying pace into today's megacity. Today, faced with land subsidence, flooding and congestion, Indonesia is building a new capital, Nusantara, on the island of Borneo. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The political and cultural heart of Indonesia: home of Borobudur and the great Javanese empires, of the capital Jakarta and of a chain of volcanoes that defines the island.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before the skyscrapers and the traffic jams, a port called Sunda Kelapa stood at the mouth of the Ciliwung River. It was the main anchorage of the Hindu Kingdom of Sunda, which ruled western Java, and from there pepper above all was shipped to the markets of Asia. Its position on the strait between Java and Sumatra made it a natural stop on the trade routes linking China, India and the Malay world, and merchants from half the world passed through its docks.
In the early 16th century, when the Portuguese reached the region after taking Malacca (1511), the Kingdom of Sunda saw them as a possible ally against the spread of Islam from the interior. In 1522 the two signed a treaty, and the Portuguese got permission to build a fortress at Sunda Kelapa. But they never built it in time.
On 22 June 1527, a Muslim army from the coastal sultanates of Demak and Banten, led by Fatahillah (also known as Sunan Gunung Jati), conquered the port and put an end to the Portuguese plans. Fatahillah renamed the city Jayakarta, usually translated as 'city of victory' or 'great deed'. Centuries later, that name would give us Jakarta. The date of that conquest, 22 June, is still celebrated today as the city's anniversary.
In the early 17th century the Dutch arrived, determined to wrest control of the hugely lucrative spice trade from the Portuguese and the English. The Dutch East India Company (the VOC), the first great multinational corporation in history, was looking for a permanent base. In 1619, under the ruthless command of Governor-General Jan Pieterszoon Coen, VOC troops razed Jayakarta and founded a new city on its ashes: Batavia, named after the ancient Batavi, the legendary ancestors of the Dutch.
Batavia was built in the image of a Dutch city, with straight canals, walls, a castle and brick houses, in a tropical climate it was never designed for: the stagnant canals became breeding grounds for malaria and other diseases, and Batavia earned the grim nickname 'the graveyard of the East' for its extremely high death rate. For almost two centuries it was the capital of the entire Dutch trading empire in Asia and one of the great ports of the world, with a monopoly on nutmeg, cloves, pepper and other spices that were worth real fortunes in Europe.
The city rested on a brutal order: a European minority ruled a mostly Asian population, with thousands of enslaved people brought from different parts of the archipelago and beyond, and a large Chinese community that was essential to trade. That tension exploded in 1740 in what became known as the 'Batavia massacre' or 'Chinezenmoord', when the authorities and the European population killed some ten thousand Chinese, one of the darkest episodes in the city's colonial history. The VOC, corrupt and deep in debt, went bankrupt in 1799 and its possessions passed to the Dutch state.
Throughout the 19th century, Batavia remained the capital of the Dutch East Indies, the vast colony that covered the whole of present-day Indonesia. The city grew beyond its old, unhealthy walls: the administration moved to new, higher neighbourhoods to the south, such as Weltevreden and, later, elegant Menteng, with its tree-lined boulevards and colonial villas. The colonial system relied on the intensive exploitation of plantations (coffee, sugar, tobacco, rubber) through the so-called 'Cultivation System', which made the Netherlands rich at the expense of the Javanese peasantry.
In the early 20th century, an Indonesian nationalist movement began to take shape in Batavia and other cities, driven by a new generation of educated young people. A key milestone came in the city on 28 October 1928: at a youth congress, delegates from across the archipelago took the 'Youth Pledge' (Sumpah Pemuda), committing themselves to one motherland, one nation and one language, Indonesian. It was the symbolic birth certificate of the idea of Indonesia as a nation.
In 1942, during the Second World War, Imperial Japan invaded and occupied the Dutch East Indies, driving out the European colonisers. The Japanese renamed the city Jakarta, restoring an Indonesian name. The occupation was harsh and exploitative, but by weakening Dutch power and arming and mobilising young Indonesians, it decisively sped up the road to independence.
The most important moment in the history of Jakarta, and of all Indonesia, came on 17 August 1945. Just two days after the Japanese surrender that ended the Second World War, and taking advantage of the power vacuum, nationalist leaders Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta read out a short but momentous proclamation of independence in a house in Jakarta. With those few lines the Republic of Indonesia was born, and Sukarno became its first president.
Independence, however, was not recognised straight away. The Dutch tried to take back their colony, and four years of revolutionary war followed, with fighting, negotiations and international pressure. Finally, in December 1949, unable to hold on to the colony and facing condemnation from the international community, the Netherlands recognised Indonesia's sovereignty. Jakarta was confirmed as the capital of the new nation.
The following decades transformed the city completely. Sukarno, with a monumental vision, wanted to make Jakarta the showcase of a modern, independent nation: he had the National Monument (Monas), the great Istiqlal Mosque, stadiums, avenues and large buildings put up. After Sukarno's fall and Suharto's rise to power in 1966-1967, the 'New Order' began, an authoritarian regime lasting three decades under which Jakarta modernised, filled with skyscrapers and multiplied its population, but also built up inequality, corruption and tensions that would explode at the end of the century.
The end of the 20th century was turbulent in Jakarta. In 1998, in the middle of a brutal Asian economic crisis, huge student protests and riots broke out in the city, leaving hundreds dead and including targeted attacks on the Chinese-Indonesian community, one of the most painful episodes in its recent history. Those days forced President Suharto to resign after 32 years in power and opened the period known as 'Reformasi', Indonesia's transition to democracy. Jakarta was the main stage of that change.
In the 21st century, Jakarta established itself as one of the largest megacities on the planet: its metropolitan area, Jabodetabek, is home to more than 30 million people. It is the economic engine of Indonesia, with an ever-taller skyline, a thriving middle class and a vibrant cultural and food scene. But that rapid growth brought enormous problems: some of the worst traffic jams in the world, pollution and, above all, severe land subsidence. Massive groundwater extraction and the weight of urban development mean that parts of the north of the city are sinking several centimetres a year, making flooding worse.
Faced with this, the Indonesian government made a historic decision: to move the country's administrative capital to a new city, Nusantara, built from scratch on the island of Borneo (Kalimantan). The project, launched in the 2020s, aims to ease the pressure on a Jakarta stretched to its limits. Even if the political capital moves, Jakarta will certainly remain the great economic, financial and human heart of Indonesia: an imperfect, overflowing city, but essential for understanding the country.
