City Palace Udaipur: What to See & Skip
Rajasthan’s largest palace complex is also its most confusing to visit. The City Palace is not one building but roughly four centuries of buildings stacked, wedged and grafted onto a ridge above Lake Pichola by a succession of Maharanas who each added rooms without demolishing anyone else’s. The route through it is a one-way maze of narrow stairs and low doorways, the ticketing has more add-ons than a budget airline, and the boat jetty for Jag Mandir is hidden inside the grounds. Get the structure straight before you go and it becomes the best half day in Udaipur.
Four hundred years, one wall
Maharana Udai Singh II founded Udaipur in the 1550s after Chittorgarh fell, and began the palace on the ridge above the lake he had dammed. Every Maharana of Mewar after him added to it. That is why the complex reads the way it does from the water — a single continuous granite-and-marble façade of enormous length, with domes, cupolas, balconies and octagonal towers that plainly do not belong to the same century as each other.
Two things make Mewar’s palace different in character from Jaipur’s or Jodhpur’s. The first is that the House of Mewar refused Mughal marriage alliance for far longer than its neighbours, and the buildings carry that self-image: the sun emblem appears everywhere, from the Suryavanshi claim of descent. The second is that the complex is still partly a functioning royal establishment — two of its wings operate as hotels, the family trust runs the museum, and you will occasionally find a courtyard closed for a private function.
The route, in order
Entry is through Badi Pol and Tripolia Pol, the great gates on the eastern side, into the outer courtyards. The museum route then runs roughly as follows, and it matters that it is one-way — backtracking through the narrow stairs is difficult once tour groups are moving, so do not save something for the way out.
Rai Angan is the first courtyard proper, on the spot where tradition holds Udai Singh met the sage who told him to build his city here. Portraits of the Maharanas line the surrounding rooms; skim them, but note the sequence — you are about to walk through the rooms these men added.
Manak Mahal and the Chini Chitrashala come next: a crystal- and porcelain-lined audience alcove, and a courtyard faced in Chinese and Dutch tiles that tells you how far Mewar’s trade reached.
Mor Chowk is the first genuine stop-and-look. Its wall carries three peacocks in inlaid glass and coloured mosaic, one for each of summer, winter and monsoon, set into niches on a raised terrace — 19th-century work, several thousand pieces of glass each, and by common agreement the finest decorative surface in the palace. Give it real time. Most people photograph it in thirty seconds and miss the detail in the tails.
Sheesh Mahal, the mirror palace, is smaller than the equivalent at Amber and more intimate for it — a chamber of convex mirrorwork built for a Maharani, designed to multiply candlelight into a room full of stars.
Krishna Vilas holds the palace’s best collection of miniature paintings: royal processions, festivals, hunts and court scenes rendered in the Mewar school, room after room of them. It is also associated with the memory of Princess Krishna Kumari, whose death in 1810 amid a dispute between rival suitors is one of the sadder passages in Mewar’s history. The rooms are quiet and easy to hurry past. Don’t.
Zenana Mahal, the women’s quarters, opens into the wide Laxmi Chowk courtyard with its white pavilion — the largest open space in the complex and a relief after the corridors. The zenana wing now houses much of the museum’s exhibition, including the palace’s photographic and textile collections.
Badi Mahal (Amar Vilas) is the surprise: a garden courtyard with trees and a water pool sitting on top of a natural rock outcrop, effectively four storeys above the ground you entered on, with no hint from below that it is there.
Moti Mahal, Bhim Vilas and Dilkhusha Mahal fill out the upper circuit with more mirrorwork, murals and armoury.
The real payoff: the jharokha views
Every account of the City Palace lists the rooms. The rooms are good. But the reason to climb through all of it is the jharokhas — the projecting balcony windows that punctuate the outer wall on the upper floors, each one framing Lake Pichola, the Lake Palace sitting on the water, Jag Mandir further out, and the Aravallis behind.
They are the best views in Udaipur, better than the rooftop restaurants because you are higher and the frame does the composition for you. There are several, at different heights and angles, and they are the thing you will remember. Budget your time so you are not rushing the top floors — which means not spending forty minutes on the portrait galleries at the start.
The add-ons: what to pay for
Ticketing here is layered. Broadly, there is a grounds/entry ticket that gets you into the complex, a museum ticket for the palace route above, and then separately priced extras. What is worth it:
The audio guide — yes. The rooms are unlabelled in places and the building’s chronology is impossible to follow unaided. This is the single best add-on.
The Crystal Gallery — a qualified no, for most people. The story is genuinely wonderful: Maharana Sajjan Singh ordered a vast quantity of cut crystal furniture from an English manufacturer in the 1870s — beds, chairs, tables, decanters, a fountain — and died before it arrived. The crates sat unopened for over a century. What you get for a separate and notably expensive ticket is that collection displayed in the Durbar Hall of Fateh Prakash, with no photography permitted. If you love decorative arts, or the anecdote has already got you, go. For most visitors it is a room of glassware at a price that would buy a good dinner on a rooftop over the lake, and the Durbar Hall itself is the better half of the visit. Decide before you queue, not in it.
The vintage and classic car collection — yes, if cars interest you at all. It is housed in the former royal garage near Gulab Bagh, a short distance from the palace rather than inside it, with its own ticket. Rolls- Royces, Cadillacs, a Mercedes or two, and the Rolls that appeared in Octopussy — a genuinely good small collection, and a pleasant twenty minutes away from crowds.
The jetty is inside — plan around it
This is the piece of information that reorganises your day. Boats to Jag Mandir leave from Rameshwar Ghat, which is inside the City Palace grounds. You need a grounds ticket to reach the jetty at all.
Which means: do not do the palace on one day and the boat on another and pay to get in twice. Do the palace museum in the morning, come out, have lunch, and return to the jetty in the late afternoon for the sunset departure — that is the single best day in Udaipur, and the boat trip itself is covered in detail in our Jag Mandir guide.
Practicalities
- Time needed: allow a half day for the museum route. Two hours is the absolute minimum and will feel like a forced march; three to four is comfortable with the audio guide.
- Go early. The complex opens in the morning and the tour groups arrive around mid-morning. The corridors between Mor Chowk and Badi Mahal are narrow enough that a single large group turns the route into a queue. The first ninety minutes after opening are worth getting up for.
- Wear grippy shoes. Worn marble steps, uneven stone, low lintels. Watch your head repeatedly — the doorways were not built for the average modern height.
- Not step-free. The upper palace is stairs throughout and there is no practical route around them.
- Eat inside or just outside. There are cafés within the complex with lake views, and the ghat-side restaurants a few minutes’ walk north.
Where it fits
The City Palace is Udaipur’s anchor and belongs on your first full day — it gives you the geography of the whole city from above, which makes everything afterwards make sense. Pair it with Jagdish Temple on the way in, the Jag Mandir boat in the afternoon, and the Bagore ki Haveli dance show at dusk. Our 3-day Udaipur itinerary times that day out properly, the Udaipur destination guide covers the rest of the city, and if a third day frees up, the Kumbhalgarh and Ranakpur drive is the best day out in Rajasthan.
For the same treatment applied to Jaipur’s most misunderstood monument, see our Hawa Mahal guide.