Pune City Guide
Complete guides to Pune’s heritage sites — Shaniwar Wada, Dagdusheth Ganpati, Kelkar Museum, Aga Khan Palace, Sinhagad Fort and Parvati Hill.
Kelkar Museum Pune has a problem that the best museums sometimes have: it contains so much that visitors move through too quickly, seeing the collection but not seeing it. A visitor who spends 45 minutes at kelkar museum pune things to see has technically visited. A visitor who spends 2.5 hours has had an entirely … Read more
The Mastani Mahal Pune is one of those heritage discoveries that most visitors to Pune do not know exists until they are standing inside it — and then cannot quite believe they did not know. At the Raja Dinkar Kelkar Museum on Bajirao Road, on the second floor, there is a room assembled from the … Read more
Most heritage buildings in India tell the story of power — of kings, generals, and conquests. Aga Khan Palace Pune tells a different story. It was built as an act of charity by a man who wanted to give employment to those who had none. It then became, through no design of its own, the … Read more
Kelkar Museum Pune is one of those places that almost everyone who visits leaves saying the same thing: why does no one talk about this? The Raja Dinkar Kelkar Museum on Bajirao Road holds over 20,000 objects collected by one man across six decades of travel across India. A suit of armour made from crocodile … Read more
There is a moment about two-thirds of the way up the 103 steps of Parvati Hill Pune when the city spreads out below you and you realise that what you are climbing is not just a hill with temples at the top. You are climbing the most personally significant piece of geography in Pune’s 18th-century … Read more
The sinhagad fort trek is the most popular trek in Maharashtra and one of the most accessible serious climbs anywhere in India. In a single morning, you can leave Pune city, drive 35 kilometres to the base, complete the sinhagad fort trek to a 1,312-metre summit, eat pitla bhakri with kulhad dahi in a cloud, … Read more
Most visitors to Shaniwar Wada enter through the Delhi Darwaza, spend a moment with the iron spikes, photograph the view through the arch, and move on to the garden. They leave having seen one of the five shaniwar wada gates. The other four — each with its own name, its own story, and its own … Read more
The history of Shaniwar Wada begins with a general who never lost a battle and ends with a fire that burned for seven days and was never explained. In between, across roughly one hundred years, this fort-palace in the heart of old Pune was the seat of an empire that stretched from the Deccan to … Read more
Every city has its ghost stories. Pune has one that stands apart from the rest — not because it is more dramatic than ordinary ghost lore, but because it is rooted in a documented historical event so specific, so brutal, and so politically charged that the line between history and haunting almost disappears. The shaniwar … Read more
There is a moment in any first visit to Dagdushet Ganpati when the temple stops being a landmark on your itinerary and becomes something else entirely. It happens when the aarti begins — the brass instruments, the conch shell, the rhythm of a hundred voices — and the sheer scale of devotion in that small … Read more