Shimla

Shimla is the hill station that the British Empire built to escape itself. For roughly half of every year, through the decades before Independence, this ridge of the lower Himalayas — a little over 2,200 metres up, wreathed in deodar cedar and afternoon cloud — became the summer capital of British India, the place from which a subcontinent was governed while Delhi and Calcutta baked below. That improbable history is stamped on almost everything you see: a mock-Tudor railway board office, a grey stone church on a green open ridge, a viceroy's palace with the proportions of a Scottish country house, and a mile-long pedestrian promenade lined with gabled shopfronts that could have been lifted from an English market town and set down among the pines.

Sitting in the Shivalik and lower Himalayan folds of south-central Himachal Pradesh, Shimla — the state capital since Himachal was formed — spreads along a crescent of interconnected hills. The town's spine is the Ridge, a broad open terrace at around 2,200 metres, and from it the streets tumble away down steep slopes in tiers, so that a walk across town is really a walk up and down. On a clear morning the snow line of the higher Himalaya glitters to the north and east; on a misty one the whole place vanishes into a soft grey world of pine silhouettes and lamplight. Locals and old brochures alike call it the "Queen of the Hills," and the nickname has stuck for good reason.

The single most romantic way to arrive tells you a lot about the place. The Kalka–Shimla Railway — the "toy train" — is a narrow-gauge marvel of British engineering that grinds up 96 kilometres of hillside through more than a hundred tunnels and hundreds of bridges and curves, and it carries UNESCO World Heritage status as part of the Mountain Railways of India. Riding it into Shimla, rather than driving, turns the journey itself into one of the trip's highlights.

But Shimla is not only a museum of the Raj. It is a living, working Himachali town — the seat of the state government, a busy market and education hub, and the gateway to the apple country and high valleys of Kinnaur and Spiti beyond. Its everyday texture is Pahari (hill) culture: wooden temples, terraced orchards, a mellow mountain pace, and a kitchen of steamed siddu bread, chickpea madra and river trout that has nothing to do with the tea-and-scones colonial cliché. The mix of the two — imperial nostalgia layered over a hardy hill town — is exactly what gives Shimla its particular flavour.

Practically, Shimla suits almost any kind of trip. It works as a two- or three-day mountain break in its own right, an easy weekend from Chandigarh or Delhi, a honeymoon or family classic, and the first anchor of a longer Himachal loop pushing on to Narkanda, Sarahan and the Sutlej valley. Give it at least a full day of unhurried walking on the Ridge and Mall, a half-day for the Viceregal Lodge and the toy train, and a day trip or two into the surrounding hills, and you will understand why the British never wanted to leave in summer — and why so many travellers now come back.