The Most Beautiful Castles, Palaces and Fortresses in India
14 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful castles, palaces and fortresses in India are Agra Fort, Amber Fort and Gwalior Fort. The list covers 14 castles, palaces and fortresses. Last updated 13 October 2026.
India's forts and palaces were shaped by terrain and rivalry. In Rajasthan the Rajput clans built on the ridges of the Aravalli range and on desert outcrops, where sheer rock made a wall half-built already; the Mughals brought red sandstone, marble inlay and garden courts; and later maharajas mixed Indian and European forms. Within the walls, latticed screens, mirrored halls and painted chambers turned military strongholds into palaces of great refinement.
Agra Fort, rebuilt by Akbar in red sandstone from 1565, holds marble pavilions added by Shah Jahan within sight of the Taj Mahal. Fatehpur Sikri, Akbar's short-lived capital, preserves a whole Mughal court city in red stone. Amber Fort above Jaipur hides the Sheesh Mahal, a hall of mirror mosaic, and Gwalior Fort stretches along a sandstone plateau, its Man Mandir palace faced in blue and yellow tiles.
The desert forts are on a different scale. Mehrangarh rises straight from a rock above Jodhpur, Jaisalmer's fort of yellow sandstone is still home to thousands of residents, and the walls of Kumbhalgarh run for some 36 kilometres over the hills. Udaipur pairs its lakeside City Palace with the white marble Lake Palace on Lake Pichola. Jaipur's Hawa Mahal is a honeycomb of small latticed windows, Jahangir Mahal crowns Orchha, and Mysore Palace, rebuilt in the early 20th century, is lit by thousands of bulbs on festival nights.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Agra Fort | Fort | ✓ |
| 2 | Amber Fort | Fortress | ✓ |
| 3 | Gwalior Fort | Fortress | |
| 4 | Hawa Mahal | Palace | |
| 5 | Lake Palace | Palace | |
| 6 | City Palace, Udaipur | Palace | |
| 7 | Jaisalmer Fort | Fortress | ✓ |
| 8 | Mehrangarh Fort | Fortress | |
| 9 | Mysore Palace | Palace | |
| 10 | Fatehpur Sikri | Fort | ✓ |
| 11 | Kumbhalgarh | Fortress | ✓ |
| 12 | Jahangir Mahal, Orchha | Palace | |
| 13 | Rumi Darwaza | City gate | |
| 14 | Janjira Fort (Murud) | Fortress |
01 Agra Fort
India · 1.1 km from Agra27.180° N 78.021° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by sarangib from Pixabay The fort shows two Mughal tastes side by side. Akbar built in red stone, and his period survives in the massive outer walls, the Delhi and Amar Singh gates, and the Jahangiri Mahal.
Did you know? When the Jat ruler Suraj Mal took the fort in 1761 after a month-long siege, his men melted down its silver doors.
02 Amber Fort
India · 8.1 km from Jaipur26.986° N 75.851° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by SusanFleming from Pixabay The palace combines Rajput building with Mughal ideas, arranged around a series of courtyards that become more private as you climb. The Suraj Pol, or Sun Gate, faces east and opens onto Jaleb Chowk, the great court where the ruler's guards paraded. A flight of stairs leads up to the small Sila Devi temple, behind silver-covered doors, whose goddess image Man Singh brought back from Bengal after a victory in 1604.
Did you know? Man Singh is said to have had twelve queens and built a separate room for each, all linked by stairs to the king's apartment above.
03 Gwalior Fort
India · 3.4 km from Gwalior26.230° N 78.169° E
Abhishek Dwivedi · CC BY-SA 4.0 The best-known building is the Man Mandir palace, built by the Tomar raja Man Singh in the late fifteenth century. Its outer walls are banded with glazed tiles in turquoise, green and yellow, which earned it the name Painted Palace. Older still is the Teli ka Mandir, a towering ninth-century temple about 25 metres high whose barrel-vaulted roof recalls southern Indian forms, and the pair of richly carved Sas-Bahu temples completed in 1093.
Did you know? The fort has seven gates, and the principal entrance is the Hathi Pol, the Elephant Gate.
04 Hawa Mahal
India · 1.9 km from Jaipur26.924° N 75.827° E
Image by Anilsharma26 from Pixabay The façade is a honeycomb of 953 small windows, the jharokhas, set in projecting semi-octagonal bays and pierced with carved sandstone lattices, some of them in wood. The upper three floors are only one room deep, and the building narrows to a pyramid at the top, crowned by small domes and finials. The red and pink sandstone matches the colour that gives Jaipur its name of the Pink City.
Did you know? In 2006 the building underwent its first major restoration in about fifty years, at a cost of some 4.5 million rupees.
05 Lake Palace
India · 5.7 km from Udaipur24.575° N 73.680° E
Image by 5350755 from Pixabay For generations the rulers of Mewar used it as a place to escape the heat and the formality of the City Palace on the shore. Courtyards lined with columns, fountains and gardens held their summer durbars; inside, walls of black and white marble were set with coloured stones and ornamental niches, and a circular upper room some 21 feet across was paved in black and white marble under a dome.
Did you know? Fritz Lang shot parts of The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb here in 1959, more than twenty years before Octopussy.
06 City Palace, Udaipur
India · 5.5 km from Udaipur24.576° N 73.683° E
Image by Makalu from Pixabay The story begins in 1559, when Maharana Udai Singh II chose this lakeside ridge for a new capital after leaving the old hill fortress of Chittorgarh. Udaipur, the city that grew around his palace, became the seat of Mewar, and some twenty-two generations of his successors added their own courts and wings.
Did you know? The courts are linked by zigzag corridors, laid out deliberately so that attackers could not rush through the palace in a surprise assault.
07 Jaisalmer Fort
India26.913° N 70.913° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by DEZALB from Pixabay 6-metre wall at the base to an upper circuit studded with 99 bastions, 92 of them built or rebuilt between 1633 and 1647. Four fortified gates lead up from the town. Around 1299 the fort fell to Alauddin Khalji of Delhi after a long siege that ended, according to tradition, in a jauhar; in 1541 its ruler fought the Mughal emperor Humayun, and the fort was later under Mughal control until 1762.
Did you know? The siege of around 1299 is said to have been provoked by a Bhati raid on a treasure caravan of Sultan Alauddin Khalji.
08 Mehrangarh Fort
India · 0.6 km from Jodhpur26.298° N 73.019° E
Image by Glavo from Pixabay The site wasn't empty when he took it. A hermit named Cheeria Nathji was living on the rock, and when he was forced to move to make way for the fort, he is said to have cursed Rao Jodha and his citadel with permanent water scarcity — a curse that mattered enormously in a desert region where a fort's survival depended entirely on its water supply.
Did you know? The Dedh Kangra Pol gate still shows the marks of cannonballs fired by besieging Jaipur forces.
09 Mysore Palace
India · 1 km from Mysore12.304° N 76.654° E
Image by 3137490 from Pixabay Irwin's palace is a showpiece of the Indo-Saracenic style, mixing Hindu, Islamic, Rajput and Gothic elements in grey granite, with deep pink marble domes on its corner towers and a five-storey central tower capped by a gilded dome. The interiors are richer still.
Did you know? Records place a mud-walled fort on this site as early as 1399, centuries before the present palace.
10 Fatehpur Sikri
India · 20.1 km from Bharatpur27.091° N 77.661° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Makalu from Pixabay What survives is an unusually complete Mughal court city in red sandstone, laid out along a rocky ridge about 3 km long and enclosed by walls some 6 km long on three sides, with a former lake on the fourth.
Did you know? The five storeys of the Panch Mahal shrink towards a single domed kiosk and rest on 176 carved columns in all.
11 Kumbhalgarh
India25.149° N 73.581° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by digannt from Pixabay The fort is named after Rana Kumbha, who ruled Mewar from 1433 to 1468 and is said to have built 32 of the 84 forts in his kingdom; Kumbhalgarh was the largest and most elaborate. An inscription dates the commission to 1448. Its architect was Mandan, the chief builder of Mewar, who set down his principles in a treatise called the Rajvallabh.
Did you know? A smaller earlier fort on the site is believed to have been founded by the Mauryan king Samprati.
12 Jahangir Mahal, Orchha
India · 14.3 km from Jhansi25.351° N 78.644° E
Ms Sarah Welch · CC0 The building is a great square block arranged symmetrically around a central courtyard, rising in several storeys of terraces, hanging balconies, porches and apartments.
Did you know? The pepper-pot domes and chhatris of Orchha's palaces are credited with inspiring Edwin Lutyens in his designs for New Delhi.
13 Rumi Darwaza
India · 1.6 km from Lucknow26.871° N 80.912° E
Rishabhgpt · CC BY-SA 4.0 Nawab Asaf-ud-Daula built the gate in 1784, the same year his great Bara Imambara next door was completed. That project had begun in 1780, a famine year, and was meant in part to give work to the people of the region.
Did you know? Internal staircases lead up through the structure to the domed pavilion at its summit.
14 Janjira Fort (Murud)
India18.300° N 72.964° E
Sanjaybhagwat · CC BY-SA 4.0 The name comes from the Arabic jazira, "island". Tradition holds that local Koli fishermen first built a wooden stockade on the rock as protection against pirates; after it was taken by a general of the Ahmadnagar Sultanate, a stone fortress replaced it.
Did you know? Sambhaji's 1682 siege collapsed when a Mughal army attacked the Maratha homeland and forced him to pull his troops away.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful castles, palaces and fortresses in India?
- On our list, Agra Fort ranks first, followed by Amber Fort and Gwalior Fort.
- Why does the Hawa Mahal have so many windows?
- Built in 1799 for Maharaja Sawai Pratap Singh, its facade has 953 small latticed windows, or jharokhas, so that royal women could watch street life and processions without being seen, while breezes cooled the rooms behind.
- Why is Jaisalmer Fort called the Golden Fort?
- It is built of yellow sandstone that glows gold in the late afternoon sun. Founded in 1156 by Rawal Jaisal, it is one of the few forts in the world still lived in, with houses, shops and temples inside its walls.
- How long is the wall of Kumbhalgarh?
- The fort's outer wall runs for about 36 kilometres over the Aravalli hills, which makes it one of the longest continuous walls in the world.
- How many castles, palaces and fortresses are on this list in India?
- The list covers 14 castles, palaces and fortresses.