Jaipur: Amer Fort Guided Tour with Local Guide

One fort, three hours, one guide

Amer rewards a guide more than any other monument in Jaipur. It is a complex of four courtyards built across 150 years by different rulers with different intentions, and without someone explaining it you are looking at beautiful rooms in no particular order.

Meet at your hotel or at the fort's main gate.

What you walk through

Jaleb Chowk, the first courtyard, where returning armies paraded and the maharaja reviewed them. The stables along its edge are still there.

Ganesh Pol, the painted gateway into the private palace — plaster over stone, still carrying its original pigment in places, with a screened gallery above it from which the women of the court could look down on arrivals unseen.

Sheesh Mahal, the mirror palace. Thousands of convex glass fragments set into the ceiling and walls so that a single candle would read as a sky full of stars. It was imported Belgian glass, cut and set by local craftsmen.

Sukh Niwas across the courtyard, where water ran through channels cut into the marble walls, cooled by evaporation — air conditioning, four hundred years early.

The zenana, the fourth courtyard: twelve apartments for twelve queens around a single yard, with the corridors deliberately arranged so that the maharaja could visit one without the others knowing which.

The setting

Maota Lake below, with the Kesar Kyari garden laid out in the water in a saffron-bed pattern, and Jaigarh on the ridge above, connected by a tunnel.

Practical

Three hours, and a fair amount of climbing on uneven stone — flat shoes.

Go early. Amer at nine in the morning and Amer at noon are different experiences.

Entrance is ₹550 for foreign nationals, paid at the gate. The elephant rides at the base operate independently and we do not book them; a jeep runs the same ramp.