Delhi

Delhi is not one city but the accumulated wreckage and glory of many. For most of the past thousand years the plain between the Aravalli ridge and the Yamuna river has been a seat of power, and successive rulers each built their own capital here. Historians conventionally count the "seven cities of Delhi" — from Lal Kot and Siri to Tughlaqabad, Firozabad and Shahjahanabad — with Lutyens' New Delhi added as the eighth. Walk almost anywhere and you are standing on a layer of this palimpsest: a Tughlaq wall behind a petrol pump, a Lodhi-era tomb marooned in a public park, a Mughal gate opening onto a metro station. Few capitals wear their history quite so openly.

The clearest way to grasp Delhi is the split between Old Delhi and New Delhi. Old Delhi is Shahjahanabad, the walled city the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan founded in the 1600s around the Red Fort and Jama Masjid — a dense, chaotic, endlessly compelling warren of bazaars, havelis and food lanes. New Delhi is the deliberate, monumental capital the British laid out in the early twentieth century, with its wide tree-lined avenues, roundabouts, bungalows and the ceremonial axis running from Rashtrapati Bhavan down Kartavya Path to India Gate. Between and around them sprawls modern Delhi: the corporate towers of Gurugram and Noida in the National Capital Region, the boutiques of the southern colonies, and the villages-turned-nightlife-hubs like Hauz Khas.

For the traveller, Delhi is above all a gateway. It is the entry point for the great majority of first-time visitors to northern India, the base of the classic Golden Triangle circuit that loops through Agra and Jaipur, and the launch pad for onward journeys to Rajasthan, the Himalayas, Varanasi and beyond. The city holds three UNESCO World Heritage Sites — the Qutub Minar complex and Humayun's Tomb, both inscribed in 1993, and the Red Fort Complex, inscribed in 2007 — a concentration matched by few cities in the world. Around them are dozens more monuments, museums, gardens and shrines spanning Hindu, Islamic, Sikh, Jain, Christian and Bahá'í traditions, a genuinely cosmopolitan religious landscape.

Delhi rewards and tests visitors in equal measure. It is loud, crowded and, in the winter months, notoriously polluted — realities worth planning around rather than pretending away. But it is also generous: home to some of the subcontinent's finest Mughlai cooking and its most famous street food, to world-class craft markets, and to a pace of life where centuries genuinely coexist on a single street. Give it three or four days, come with patience and curiosity, and Delhi opens up as one of Asia's most layered and rewarding capitals — the essential first chapter of almost any Indian journey.