Guides to Jaipur tend to present Amber, Nahargarh and Jaigarh as a set, which gives the impression they are three versions of the same thing and that a thorough visitor sees all of them. They are three quite different buildings with quite different claims on your time, and the most common planning mistake in Jaipur is dividing a day evenly between them.
They are not scattered around the city
The useful geographical fact first: all three are north of the walled city, and Amber and Jaigarh are on the same hillside, connected by a fortified passage. Nahargarh is on the neighbouring ridge.
That means they group into a single day, and the road out to them is the same road. It also means the eleven kilometres between this cluster and the old city gets travelled twice if you plan badly, which is the argument for keeping the forts and the walled city on separate days.
Amber: a palace, and the only three-hour item
Amber is a fort by outline and a palace by function. Behind the walls is a sequence of courtyards, halls and private apartments built up the hillside over generations, and it is decorated to a level the other two are not.
The Sheesh Mahal, the mirrored hall, is what most people come for and it earns the attention. The part that gets walked past is the water engineering. Water was raised from the lake below and run through carved channels in the Sukh Niwas so that air moving across it cooled the room. Standing in it for a few minutes is the thing that explains how the building was meant to be lived in, as opposed to looked at.
Give it three hours, and go at opening. The climb through the upper courtyards is in stone that holds heat, and from March onwards the difference between nine in the morning and midday is substantial.
Nahargarh: go for the view, not the building
Nahargarh is modest next to Amber. It has a pleasant nineteenth-century residential block with painted rooms, but nobody visits it for the architecture.
It is worth going because of where it sits. The ridge puts you directly above Jaipur, and the view down over the grid of the old city at dusk is the best single sight in two days. An hour is enough. Leave before it is fully dark, because the road down is narrow.
Jaigarh: the working half
If Amber is where the court lived, Jaigarh is what kept it safe. It holds the fortifications, the water storage that supplied the complex, and a cannon foundry. The Jaivana cannon there is among the largest wheeled cannon of its era.
This is a genuinely interesting place if military architecture and engineering interest you, and a fairly bare hilltop if they do not. It is the honest one to drop, and dropping it is not a failure of thoroughness.
The stepwell nobody plans for
Ten minutes from Amber is Panna Meena ka Kund, a sixteenth-century stepwell with symmetrical staircases running down all four sides. It takes about twenty minutes and it is usually quiet. You are not allowed onto the steps themselves, which disappoints people who have seen photographs, but the view from the top edge is the point.
It costs almost nothing in time and it is the best small thing in the area.
How to order the day
- Amber at opening. Three hours, and the heat is the reason for the early start.
- Panna Meena ka Kund. Twenty minutes, immediately afterwards.
- Jaigarh, optionally. An hour, and only if the subject appeals.
- Nahargarh at sunset. An hour, and worth protecting the timing for.
Jal Mahal, the palace sitting in the middle of Man Sagar lake, is on this road. You cannot go in. Look at it from the car for five minutes on the way past; that is the correct amount of Jal Mahal.
Fitting it into a trip
This is day one of the two-day Jaipur itinerary; day two is the walled city on foot. Whether the climb at Amber is pleasant or punishing depends almost entirely on which month you come in.
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