From Delhi : Taj Mahal & Agra Tour with 5* Lunch

Why the Taj closes on Fridays

Because it is a working mosque complex, not only a tomb. The red sandstone mosque on the western side of the platform holds Friday prayers, and the whole complex shuts to ticketed visitors for the day.

That is worth knowing when you book, and it is also a useful reminder of what the building is: Shah Jahan commissioned a rauza, a tomb garden, with a mosque, a guest house, a gateway, a bazaar and a caravanserai around it. The town of Taj Ganj to the south was built to house the workforce and it is still there — people live in lanes laid out for stonemasons in the 1630s.

The day

Pickup from your hotel or the airport in and around Delhi, then the Yamuna Expressway south.

Taj Mahal. Twenty-two years, twenty thousand workers, and white marble carted 400 km from Makrana in Rajasthan.

Your guide covers the calligraphy cut in progressively larger letters so it reads the same height from the ground — signed, unusually, by the calligrapher Amanat Khan; the pietra dura inlay, up to sixty stones in a single flower; the four minarets, tilted fractionally outward so an earthquake would take them away from the tomb; and the one deliberate asymmetry, Shah Jahan's own cenotaph, placed off-axis by Aurangzeb.

Agra Fort. Akbar's walled city of 1565 in red sandstone, with his grandson's marble palaces inside, and the Musamman Burj where that grandson died a prisoner of his own son with the Taj in view down the river.

Lunch

At a five-star hotel on the inclusive option, which on a twelve-hour day is worth more than it costs.

Two options

AC private car, driver and guide; or all-inclusive with lunch and monument entrances.

Practical

Closed Fridays. Tell us about vegetarian, Jain or no-chilli requirements when you book.