Agra Fort Tour With Squirrel Feeding

The fort, and the squirrels

The squirrel feeding is a small thing and it is the reason people remember this tour. Agra Fort's gardens are full of northern palm squirrels — the striped ones, three pale lines down a grey-brown back — and generations of them have grown up around visitors. They will take a peanut from an open palm.

It takes ten minutes at the end and children do not forget it.

Agra Fort

A walled city rather than a fort. Akbar began it in 1565 in red sandstone, replacing an older brick structure; two and a half kilometres of wall, a double moat, and about a quarter of the interior open to visitors — the rest is still with the Indian Army.

You enter by the Amar Singh Gate, angled and doubled deliberately so that war elephants could not charge it in a straight line.

Jahangiri Mahal is the surviving piece of Akbar's own residential work: carved brackets and beams rather than arches, Hindu and Central Asian forms used openly, built for his Rajput wives.

Then Shah Jahan's marble: the Diwan-i-Am where the emperor heard public petitions from a raised alcove, the Diwan-i-Khas for private audience, the Khas Mahal with its gilded pavilions, and the Sheesh Mahal bath house set with thousands of mirror fragments.

Musamman Burj

The octagonal marble tower on the river wall, and the reason this fort holds people.

In 1658 Aurangzeb deposed his father and imprisoned him here. Shah Jahan spent the last eight years of his life in these rooms looking downriver at the Taj Mahal he had built for his wife. He died in the tower and was carried across to be buried beside her.

Three options

Guide only; private car, driver and guide; or the same with the entrance ticket — ₹650 for foreign nationals.

Practical

Three hours with hotel pickup. Open every day including Friday, which makes it the right booking for the day the Taj is closed.