Private Taj Mahal Sameday Tour From Delhi in Agra

Three monuments, one car, one day

Most Delhi day trips do the Taj and the fort. Adding the Baby Taj is what makes this one worth its eleven hours, because it is the building the Taj was learned from and it is almost always empty.

The drive

Early pickup in Delhi, then the Yamuna Expressway — a modern six-lane road, three to three and a half hours with a break.

Taj Mahal

Shah Jahan began it in 1632, the year after Mumtaz Mahal died giving birth to their fourteenth child. Twenty thousand workers and twenty-two years; the marble came 300 km from Makrana in Rajasthan by ox cart.

Your guide will show you the parts that are easy to walk past: the calligraphy on the great arch, cut in progressively larger letters so it reads the same height from the ground; the pietra dura, where one inlaid flower can contain sixty separate stones; the four minarets, tilted fractionally outward so an earthquake would drop them clear of the tomb; and the single asymmetry in the whole composition — Shah Jahan's own cenotaph, added off-axis by Aurangzeb.

Agra Fort

A walled city rather than a fort — two and a half kilometres of red sandstone begun by Akbar in 1565, with Shah Jahan's marble palaces inside: the Diwan-i-Am, the Khas Mahal, the Sheesh Mahal.

And the Musamman Burj, the octagonal tower where Aurangzeb imprisoned his father for the last eight years of his life, with the Taj visible down the river.

Itimad-ud-Daulah, the Baby Taj

Across the Yamuna. Nur Jahan built it between 1622 and 1628 for her father: the first entirely marble Mughal building, and the first in India to use pietra dura. Smaller than the Taj, more finely inlaid, and quiet.

Three options

Car and guide; car, guide and entry fees; or all of that with a meal.

Practical

Eleven hours door to door. The Taj is closed on Fridays. Entrance fees run about ₹2,260 a head for a foreign adult across the three sites unless your option covers them.