Delhi: Deer Park and Hauz Khas Village Walking Tour

Delhi at walking pace

This is the rare Delhi tour that is genuinely on foot, and it works because everything sits inside one green kilometre in the south of the city. No traffic, no car, four hours of shade and ruins.

Deer Park

A proper city park with spotted deer in an enclosure, peacocks that wander where they like, rabbits, and enough birds that people come here with binoculars. It is part of the larger Hauz Khas green belt, and on a winter morning it is one of the quietest places in a city of twenty million.

The Hauz Khas complex

The reservoir came first. Alauddin Khalji had it dug around 1300 to water the new city of Siri — hauz khas simply means royal tank. Fifty years later Firoz Shah Tughlaq desilted it and built a madrasa along two sides, one of the leading centres of Islamic learning in the world at the time, with his own tomb attached at the corner.

What stands today is a colonnade of stone chambers looking down over the water, pavilions along the edge, and a tomb with a ceiling still carrying traces of its original plaster medallions. Late afternoon, the light comes straight down the length of the tank.

Hauz Khas Village

The lanes behind the ruins were a farming village until the 1980s, when designers started taking the cheap upper floors. Now it is galleries, small restaurants, vintage clothing and bars stacked three storeys up narrow staircases — the contrast of a 14th-century madrasa and a boutique selling screen-printed tote bags across a single wall is the whole point of the walk.

Two options

Guided walk only, or the walk with transfers from your hotel included. There is a fair amount of walking on uneven stone; flat shoes.