Bikaner

Bikaner, on the northern edge of the Thar Desert, is Rajasthan's least-visited major city — which makes it the most rewarding for the traveller willing to make the journey, a city of golden sandstone havelis and a fort more intact and less crowded than any equivalent in the state.

The Junagarh Fort, built between 1589 and 1593 and never captured by any invader, retains an extraordinary collection of royal apartments added by successive rulers over four centuries, each in the style of their period — Mughal, Rajput, European Baroque, Victorian. The Anup Mahal, with its gilded gesso decoration and lacquered walls, is the most elaborately decorated room in any Rajasthan fort.

The havelis of the old city — the Rampuria and Kothari merchant families' homes, built from red sandstone — are the most concentrated examples of domestic stone carving in Rajasthan. The Karni Mata temple at Deshnoke, 30 kilometres south, where approximately 25,000 black rats live as sacred manifestations of the goddess's disciples, is one of the most singular religious sites in India — visited not for prurient fascination but because the relationship between devotion and the unconventional is exactly what makes Indian religion so inexhaustible.

Places to Visit in Bikaner

• Junagarh Fort
• Lalgarh Palace
• Camel Breeding Farm
• Bikaner old city

Things to Do in Bikaner

• Fort architecture tour
• Camel farm visit
• Old city haveli walk