Ahmedabad

Ahmedabad wears a distinction no other Indian city can claim: in July 2017 its walled old town became India's first UNESCO World Heritage City, a status that recognises not a single monument but the whole living fabric of a six-hundred-year-old town — its mosques and temples, its gated neighbourhoods, and the tens of thousands of people who still live inside them. That is the key to understanding the place. Ahmedabad is not a city you tick off in a morning at one famous building; it is a city you walk into, where the heritage is a lived-in, working thing rather than a fenced-off relic.

Founded in 1411 by Sultan Ahmad Shah I on the eastern bank of the Sabarmati river, Ahmedabad grew into the commercial and political heart of the Gujarat Sultanate and, for stretches of its history, one of the wealthiest textile-trading cities in the subcontinent. The sultanate left behind a remarkable school of Indo-Islamic architecture — mosques and tombs in which lotus-carved domes, temple-style bell pillars and delicate stone lattice betray the Hindu and Jain craftsmen who built them. The old city that grew up around these monuments is a dense weave of pols, self-contained residential quarters entered through a single gate, packed with carved wooden houses, communal wells, bird-feeders and hidden courtyards. Wandering them, ideally on the city's celebrated morning Heritage Walk, is the single most rewarding thing to do here.

But Ahmedabad's story did not stop with the sultans. This is also Mahatma Gandhi's city — the place from which he ran the freedom struggle for over a decade from his ashram on the Sabarmati, and from which he set out on the Salt March in 1930. It is the birthplace of India's textile industry, once nicknamed the "Manchester of the East," and today a fast-growing metropolis of universities, design schools and industry, with a reworked riverfront, a metro, and a skyline that keeps rising. Few Indian cities layer the medieval, the colonial-era freedom movement and the contemporary quite so densely.

The city rewards travellers who are curious rather than in a hurry. The headline sights — Sabarmati Ashram, the Sidi Saiyyed Jali, Jama Masjid, the Adalaj stepwell on the outskirts — can be seen briskly, but the real texture of Ahmedabad is in the small things: the fafda-jalebi eaten standing at a Sunday-morning stall, the after-dark food carnival at Manek Chowk, the quiet of a stepwell's descending galleries, the astonishing skies during the January kite festival. It is a proudly vegetarian, largely teetotal city (Gujarat is a dry state), and one of the friendliest and safest big cities in India for the independent traveller.

Practically, Ahmedabad works as a two-day city break, as the anchor for a wider Gujarat circuit taking in Saurashtra and Kutch, or as a cultural stop between Rajasthan and Mumbai. Two days is enough to cover the old city, the ashram and the riverfront comfortably, with a half-day out to Adalaj or Akshardham; add a third day and you can reach the extraordinary UNESCO-listed stepwell and sun temple to the north. However you come to it, give the old city its due on foot — it is the reason the whole town is a World Heritage Site.