Delhi: Skip-the-Line Humayun's Tomb Tour with Hotel Pick Up

The best-restored monument in India

Humayun's Tomb is worth a guided visit for the conservation story as much as the architecture. The Aga Khan Trust for Culture worked here for a decade from 2007: they removed around a million cubic feet of earth that later occupants had dumped over the garden, recovered the original levels, rebuilt the water channels so they flow again, and re-laid the stone by hand.

Before that, this was a pleasant ruin in a lawn. Now it is close to what Bega Begum commissioned.

Why it matters

She built it for her husband in 1565, nine years after he died, and brought a Persian architect to do it. What resulted was the first great Mughal garden tomb in India, and it set every convention the Taj Mahal followed sixty-seven years later — the tomb at the centre of a four-part charbagh split by water channels, the double dome, red sandstone with white marble inlay, and symmetry carried to the millimetre.

Inside

An octagonal chamber on a platform nearly seven metres high. Humayun is buried here, and so are more than a hundred other Mughals — princes, wives, nobles, interred in the side chambers over the following two centuries. It is sometimes called the dormitory of the Mughals.

In 1857 the last emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, took refuge at this tomb and was captured here by the British.

The rest of the complex

Isa Khan's tomb, twenty years older, complete with its own octagonal enclosure and mosque — and usually completely empty. The Barber's Tomb in the main garden, whose occupant nobody has identified. And the Nila Gumbad, the blue-domed tomb outside the eastern wall, recovered from railway land in the same restoration.

Three options

Guide only; car, driver and guide; or the same with the entry ticket.

Practical

Three hours with hotel pickup. Entry is ₹600 for foreign nationals.

Open daily. Early morning and the last hour before sunset are both good — the light comes down the water channels.