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Delhi doesn’t fit into one century or one mood. A 14th century stepwell sits between two glass office towers in central Delhi. Old Sufi shrines share neighborhoods with cocktail bars. Bentleys wait in traffic behind carts pulling marigolds. The best things to do in Delhi span more than 800 years of history, seven layers of city, and more food than any traveller can eat in a week. Most people who come for a day leave wishing they’d stayed three.
How to Read Delhi: A Three-Layer Guide
“Old Delhi” and “New Delhi” aren’t just neighborhoods, they’re different cities built three centuries apart. Old Delhi is Shahjahanabad, founded by Shah Jahan in 1648 as the Mughal capital. New Delhi is the British colonial city, inaugurated in 1931. Most of what you’ll want to see falls into one of these two layers, plus a few sites that predate both.
Knowing which is which saves you time. Mughal sights split between Old Delhi in the north (Red Fort, Jama Masjid, Chandni Chowk) and central Delhi (Humayun’s Tomb, Safdarjung’s Tomb). Colonial sights cluster in the centre (India Gate, Rashtrapati Bhavan, Connaught Place). Pre-Mughal Sultanate ruins are in the south (Qutub Minar, Lodhi Gardens).
Now the things to actually do.
Short on time? If you only have a day in Delhi and don’t want to navigate the traffic yourself, this private Delhi full-day tour covers most of the stops in this guide.
Qutb Minar Complex
The Qutb Minar is the oldest monument on this list and the easiest entry point into Delhi’s history.
You’re looking at a 72.5 meter minaret, the tallest brick minaret in the world, begun in 1199 by Qutb-ud-din Aibak, the founder of the Delhi Sultanate. He commissioned it as a victory monument after the Ghurid forces defeated the last Hindu Rajput king of Delhi. Aibak only finished the first level. His son-in-law Iltutmish added three more stories. Firoz Shah Tughlaq rebuilt the top in 1368 after a lightning strike. So what you’re looking at is technically a 170-year project spanning three rulers, and the materials get visibly different at each level.
Walk a little further and you’ll reach the tomb of Alauddin Khalji, the most powerful ruler of the Khalji dynasty and the man who pushed the Delhi Sultanate to its greatest territorial extent in the early 1300s. The tomb is part of a larger madrasa complex he built and is the first known example in India of a tomb attached to a school of learning.
But the genuinely strange thing in the Qutb complex is the Iron Pillar. It’s a 7 meter, 6 tonne wrought iron column, roughly 1,600 years old, probably commissioned by Chandragupta II of the Gupta Empire and moved here much later. It has stood out in the open air all that time and has never rusted. Modern metallurgists who studied it concluded the rust resistance comes from a high phosphorus content and a thin protective film of iron hydrogen phosphate. Ancient Indian metallurgy genuinely punching above its weight.
Humayun’s Tomb
If you’re going to visit the Taj Mahal later in your trip, see Humayun’s Tomb first. The Taj Mahal makes more sense once you do, which is why this sits near the top of my list of the best things to do in Delhi.
Humayun’s Tomb was built roughly 60 years before construction began on the Taj Mahal. Humayun’s Tomb is the structural ancestor of the Taj. The decorative refinements (white marble, pietra dura) came later via the “Baby Taj” in Agra, but the basic idea, a domed mausoleum on a raised platform inside a Persian paradise garden, was invented here in 1572. Same four-quadrant Charbagh layout, same water channels representing the four rivers of Quranic paradise, same symmetrical octagonal floor plan, same double dome. This was the first grand garden tomb in India, and every Mughal mausoleum that came after, including the Taj, borrowed directly from it.
The history makes the building itself more interesting. Humayun, the second Mughal emperor, died in 1556 after falling down the stairs of his library at Purana Qila. Nine years later, his first wife Bega Begum began construction of this tomb. She paid for the entire 1.5 million rupee project herself. The Persian architect Mirak Mirza Ghiyas designed it but died before completion. His son Sayyid Muhammad finished the work in 1571.
Inside the complex are also the graves of Hamida Banu Begum (Humayun’s second wife and mother of Akbar) and Dara Shikoh (Shah Jahan’s eldest son and designated heir, executed by his brother Aurangzeb in 1659 after the Mughal war of succession). It’s a building full of dynastic ghosts.
Red Fort
The Red Fort is where Delhi’s seven layers stop being history and start being current, which is why it’s near the top of any honest list of the best things to do in Delhi. The Prime Minister still hoists the national flag here every Independence Day on August 15th, in front of tens of thousands of dignitaries and every news camera in India.
Built between by Shah Jahan, who moved the Mughal capital from Agra to Delhi to build a new city around it. The architect was Ustad Ahmad Lahori, the same man who designed the Taj Mahal. The fort’s massive red sandstone walls rise up to 33 metres tall on the city side and enclose palaces, audience halls, gardens, baths, mosques, and underground passages.
Stay until evening for the sound and light show, which narrates the fort’s history from Shah Jahan to Indian independence. Pick the English version. The Hindi one is more dramatic but harder to follow if you don’t speak the language.
Jama Masjid
A five-minute rickshaw ride from the Red Fort sits Jama Masjid, the largest mosque in the Indian subcontinent at the time of its construction, and still one of the largest in India.
Built by Shah Jahan, with 5,000 workers drawn from India, Arabia, Persia, Turkey, and Europe. Inaugurated July 23, 1656 by an imam imported from Bukhara, Uzbekistan, fitting for a dynasty proud of its Central Asian Timurid origins. The whole project cost ten lakh rupees of the era.
The mosque sits on a deliberately chosen mound, the highest point in Old Delhi. Walk up the wide steps and you’re suddenly above the chaos of Chandni Chowk, looking down at a city that’s been continuously inhabited for nearly 400 years.
Chandni Chowk
Chandni Chowk is the soul of Old Delhi, and walking it is one of the best things to do in Delhi if you want to understand how the city actually lives.
The market was designed in 1650 by Princess Jahanara Begum, Shah Jahan’s favorite daughter, as part of the planning for Shahjahanabad (now Old Delhi). It originally had 1,560 shops along an almost-mile-long boulevard with a central canal fed by the Yamuna. The water reflected the moonlight at night, which is where the name comes from. Chandni means “moonlight,” chowk means “square” or “marketplace.” Moonlit Square.
The canal is gone now. The shops are still there. Some of them have been around for more than 150 years. One stop worth your time while you’re here is Khari Baoli, Asia’s largest wholesale spice market, right next to Chandni Chowk. The air alone is the experience. Beyond the market itself, the real reason to come is the food.
Lodhi Garden
Lodhi Garden is 90 acres of landscaped park in central New Delhi, scattered with 15th-century tombs from the Sayyid and Lodi dynasties, the last two ruling families of the Delhi Sultanate before the Mughals took over.
The earliest tomb here is Muhammad Shah’s, built in 1444. He was the third Sayyid ruler, and the tomb was built by his son Alam Shah, the last of the dynasty. The architecture is fascinating because it shows the Hindu-Islamic synthesis happening in real time: an Islamic octagonal tomb capped with Hindu-style chhatris (small dome pavilions). You can literally see the styles fusing.
Other monuments to look for are Sikandar Lodi’s tomb, Bara Gumbad (“Big Dome,” actually a gateway to the adjacent mosque rather than a tomb), and Shisha Gumbad (“Glass Dome,” once clad in blue glazed tiles, most of which have fallen off).
But the real reason to visit isn’t the tombs. It’s the morning walk culture. Every weekday between 6 AM and 9 AM, Lodhi Garden fills up with politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, and judges doing power-walks together. You probably won’t recognize anyone. But you’ll see exactly what a power-walk in a 600-year-old tomb complex looks like, and that’s a uniquely Delhi memory.
India Gate
India Gate is a 42 meter red sandstone arch designed by Edwin Lutyens, the British architect who planned New Delhi. The cornerstone was laid in 1921 by the Duke of Connaught (Queen Victoria’s third son), and construction was completed in 1931, the same year New Delhi was formally dedicated as the new capital of British India.
The arch is a war memorial. Inscribed on its surface are the names of more than 13,000 servicemen, the majority Indian, who died in the First World War (1914–1918) and the Third Anglo-Afghan War (1919), fighting under the British Indian Army flag in France, Mesopotamia, East Africa, and Gallipoli. The full memorial commemorates 74,187 Indian soldiers from those wars.
Underneath the arch, between 1972 and 2022, burned the Amar Jawan Jyoti, an eternal flame added to honour Indian soldiers who died in the 1971 India-Pakistan war. In January 2022 the flame was merged with the new National War Memorial flame located about 400 metres east. The arch is still there; the memorial complex is just bigger now.
This is the most touristy stop on this list and the one I’d visit last, but it’s still one of the best things to do in Delhi at sunset, when the lighting kicks in and the lawn fills up with families.
Lotus Temple
The Lotus Temple is the most photographed building in modern Delhi, and one of the few buildings on this list that was completed in living memory.
Designed by Iranian-Canadian architect Fariborz Sahba and completed in December 1986. It’s the Bahá’í House of Worship for the Indian subcontinent, but the Bahá’í faith welcomes followers of every religion. There are no priests, no rituals, no required prayers. Just a 1,300-person hall where you sit in silence and meditate.
The design is 27 free-standing white marble petals arranged in clusters of three to form a nine-sided lotus. The petals are technically thin concrete shells clad in white Penteli marble from Greece, the same stone used to build the Parthenon.
What makes this place special isn’t the architecture, though it is. It’s the rule of silence inside. You walk in, sit on a polished marble bench, and listen to 1,300 strangers not making noise. After spending time in Old Delhi traffic, sitting still in silence is one of the most underrated of the best things to do in Delhi, whether or not you’re spiritually inclined.
Swaminarayan Akshardham
If the Lotus Temple is restraint, Akshardham is maximalism. Built on the banks of the Yamuna river and constructed of Rajasthani pink sandstone and Italian Carrara marble, with no structural steel anywhere in the building. It held the Guinness World Record for World’s Largest Comprehensive Hindu Temple from 2007 until 2023, when the BAPS Akshardham in New Jersey surpassed it.
The temple is dedicated to Bhagwan Swaminarayan, an early-19th-century Hindu spiritual leader. The complex includes more than 20,000 sculpted statues of Hindu deities, sages, saints, and devotees; themed gardens; and an exhibition hall on Indian heritage.
The level of carving here is genuinely staggering. Every external surface is covered. Pillars, ceilings, walls, plinths: it’s all hand-carved sandstone and marble. About 11,000 artisans and volunteers worked on it across the five years of construction.
Gurdwara Bangla Sahib
Of every religious site in Delhi, this is the one I send first-timers to. Not because it’s the grandest, it isn’t. But because it does something none of the others do: it feeds 30,000 people a day, for free, regardless of faith, 24 hours a day, every day of the year. Eating the langar here is one of the most genuinely moving of the best things to do in Delhi, and it costs nothing.
The site was originally a bungalow belonging to Raja Jai Singh I of Amber, a senior Rajput general in Aurangzeb’s court. The shrine you see today was rebuilt in 1783 by Sikh General Sardar Baghel Singh, who also reconstructed eight other Sikh shrines in Delhi the same year. The distinctive gold dome and tall flagpole make it impossible to miss from anywhere in central Delhi. At the centre of the complex sits the Sarovar, a holy pond believed by Sikhs to have healing properties.
What to actually do here:
- Cover your head (free bandanas at the entrance), remove shoes, wash your feet at the entrance pool.
- Walk around the Sarovar slowly.
- Sit on the floor in the langar hall and eat. The meal is simple: dal, sabji, roti, rice, sometimes kheer. Volunteers serve. There’s no class system, no payment, no menu. You eat the same meal as everyone else, on a plain steel plate, sitting cross-legged.
Final Thoughts on Best Things to Do in Delhi
Delhi is the most layered city in India. You can’t really see it on a 24-hour stopover. You can only intersect with it.
But give it 2-3 days with a willingness to slow down inside the chaos and to stand for a minute at each of these places, and Delhi reveals itself as something more interesting than the hectic gateway most travelers treat it as. It’s a Mughal capital. It’s a colonial planned city. It’s a 21st-century megacity. It’s a working modern temple, a 1,600-year-old iron pillar, a princess-designed bazaar from 1650. All at once. None of those layers really win. They just keep stacking.
Eat at the langar. Walk Lodhi Garden at dawn. Stand below the Iron Pillar at Qutb. Go to Old Delhi knowing exactly which lane has the parathas. Don’t try to compare Delhi to anywhere else. Comparisons make a city this dense impossible to enjoy.
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