Lodi Gardens
Fifteenth-century royal tombs scattered across 90 acres where Delhiites do their morning walk.
Coming soon on iOS — be first to walk Delhi offline.
Almost nothing from the Sayyid and Lodi dynasties survives anywhere, making this park one of the only places to see that architecture standing. Muhammad Shah's 1444 octagonal tomb openly borrows from Hindu building traditions — lotus finials, decorative chhatri — inside an Indo-Islamic shell. The Bara Gumbad (1494) pulls a quiet trick: it looks like a tomb but was built as a gateway to a mosque.
What to look for
- Muhammad Shah's octagonal tomb: ring the outside to count the Hindu-style chhatri, each capped with a lotus finial
- Bara Gumbad's rubble-construct dome (1494): read the attached three-domed mosque behind it to understand what the gateway was actually serving
- Shish Gumbad's glazed tiles — the 'glazed dome' name is literal; look for the ceramic surface that sets it apart from the plain stone of the other monuments
On Lodi Road between Khan Market and Safdarjung's Tomb; protected by the Archaeological Survey of India.
Lodi Gardens is one of 35 sights worth the detour in Delhi, all bundled offline in Voyage GO — download the Delhi pack and it sits on your map with no signal, filling your travel passport the moment you walk past.
More to see in Delhi
- Red FortThe ramparts where Jawaharlal Nehru raised India's flag on 15 August 1947 still host that ceremony every Independence Day.
- Qutb MinarSuccessive dynasties handed this tower off across 170 years — Aibak started it in 1199, Firuz Shah Tughlaq capped it with a cupola in 1368.
- Humayun's TombThe red-sandstone ancestor of the Taj Mahal — commissioned by an empress, designed by Persian architects, and finished a century before Agra.
- Jama MasjidShah Jahan built his imperial mosque at the highest point of Shahjahanabad — the Mughal capital — and it was regarded as a symbolic gesture of Mughal power across India.
- Lotus TempleTwenty-seven marble petals, grouped in threes, fold into a single hall where any person of any faith walks in without condition.
- India GateAround 13,300 names carved in stone — soldiers lost across Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, and the Afghan frontier.