The Most Beautiful Palaces in India
5 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful palaces in India are Hawa Mahal, Lake Palace and City Palace, Udaipur. The list covers 5 palaces. Last updated 13 October 2026.
India's palaces were built by Rajput rulers, Mughal governors and princely dynasties who competed in display. Rajasthan alone produced dozens, set on lakes, hills and city walls, where sandstone screens, marble courtyards and painted halls combined Hindu and Islamic traditions. In the south, princely states commissioned their own grand residences well into the 20th century.
The Hawa Mahal in Jaipur is a five-storey façade of pink sandstone honeycombed with small latticed windows, built in 1799 so royal women could watch the street unseen. In Udaipur, the City Palace rises along the shore of Lake Pichola, a complex built up by Mewar rulers over centuries, while the white marble Lake Palace seems to float on the lake itself. Mysore Palace, rebuilt for the Wodeyar dynasty and completed in 1912, mixes Indo-Saracenic domes and arches and is lit by thousands of bulbs on festival nights. Jahangir Mahal in Orchha was built by Bir Singh Deo in the early 17th century to welcome the Mughal emperor Jahangir.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hawa Mahal | Palace | |
| 2 | Lake Palace | Palace | |
| 3 | City Palace, Udaipur | Palace | |
| 4 | Mysore Palace | Palace | |
| 5 | Jahangir Mahal, Orchha | Palace |
01 Hawa Mahal
India · 1.9 km from Jaipur26.924° N 75.827° E
Image by Anilsharma26 from Pixabay From the inside the building feels very different. The entrance is from the City Palace side, through a gateway into a courtyard enclosed by two-storey buildings, with the Hawa Mahal forming the eastern side and a small archaeological museum in the courtyard. The rear of the screen is plain, with narrow corridors and chambers, and the top two floors are reached not by stairs but by ramps. From the upper windows you look out through the lattice exactly as the court ladies did, down on the street life of old Jaipur. The monument is maintained by the archaeological department of the Government of Rajasthan.
Did you know? The cooling works on what physicists call the Venturi effect: air speeds up as it is squeezed through the small lattice openings.
02 Lake Palace
India · 5.7 km from Udaipur24.575° N 73.680° E
Image by 5350755 from Pixabay The 19th and early 20th centuries were less kind: travellers described the palace as slowly mouldering in the damp air of the lake, and by the 1950s it stood empty. In the 1960s Maharana Bhagwat Singh turned it into Udaipur's first luxury hotel, and since 1971 it has been run by Taj Hotels, with a further restoration in 2000. Its unreal beauty has made it a film set more than once, most famously as the home of the title character in the 1983 James Bond film Octopussy.
Did you know? Lake Pichola is itself artificial, first dammed in the 14th century, with its embankment strengthened by Maharana Udai Singh in 1560.
03 City Palace, Udaipur
India · 5.5 km from Udaipur24.576° N 73.683° E
Image by Makalu from Pixabay Today the complex is shared between a museum run by the Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation and heritage hotels operated by the former ruling family's company. Climb to the upper terraces for the view: below, the lake with its island palaces, and around it the whitewashed city and the hills of the Aravalli range.
Did you know? Between the Badi Pol and Tripolia gates stand eight marble arches where, it is said, the Maharanas were weighed against gold and silver that was then given to the people.
04 Mysore Palace
India · 1 km from Mysore12.304° N 76.654° E
Image by 3137490 from Pixabay The palace comes fully alive during Mysore Dasara, the autumn festival of nine nights, when the whole façade is outlined with some hundred thousand light bulbs and the procession leaves from its gates; the lights are also switched on on Sundays and public holidays. Within the walls stand several Hindu temples, from the Lakshmiramana temple, whose inscription dates to 1499, to twentieth-century shrines, and the upper floor remains the residence of the head of the Wadiyar family.
Did you know? On 30 June 1799, after the fall of Tipu Sultan, the five-year-old Krishnaraja Wadiyar III was crowned in the Lakshmiramana temple within the palace walls.
05 Jahangir Mahal, Orchha
India · 14.3 km from Jhansi25.351° N 78.644° E
Ms Sarah Welch · CC0 The palace stands inside the Orchha fort complex, which occupies an island at the confluence of the Betwa and the Jamni and is reached by a granite bridge of fourteen arches. Beside it are the Raja Mahal and other palaces and gardens built over the following centuries. Orchha itself was founded in 1501 by the Bundela ruler Rudra Pratap Singh and became the capital of a Rajput kingdom; today it is a small town whose temples, palaces and riverside chhatris have changed little since the 17th century. Part of the palace houses an archaeological museum.
Did you know? The palace rises on four levels around its square courtyard, and a steep stairway leads to the open roof above the top floor.
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 palaces in India?
- On our list, Hawa Mahal ranks first, followed by Lake Palace and City Palace, Udaipur.
- Why does the Hawa Mahal have so many windows?
- The small latticed jharokhas let women of the royal household watch processions and street life without being seen, in keeping with the custom of purdah. They also let air through, which gave the 'Palace of Winds' its name.
- Who built the Lake Palace in Udaipur?
- Maharana Jagat Singh II of Mewar built it as a summer palace on Jag Niwas island in Lake Pichola in the 1740s.
- How many palaces are on this list in India?
- The list covers 5 palaces.