Hauz Khas Fort & Lake: A Lost Evening Worth Remembering
Quick Visitor Info
Before you go, a heads-up: the details online don’t all agree. Several travel sources list a ticket price of ₹20 for Indians and ₹250 for foreign visitors, with opening hours of 10:30 AM to 7 PM. A few other sites call it free, and some give sunrise-to-sunset hours instead. Parts of the site have also been restricted for visitors while repair work goes on. So check the current ticket price and timings with the ASI or Delhi Tourism before you head out. The surrounding Deer Park, on the other hand, is free to enter, and the village outside the gates never really closes.
How It Began
It started as a shopping trip. Three college friends, one free evening in New Delhi, and locals pointing us towards Hauz Khas after Dilli Haat. The village lanes were a pleasant surprise: artsy cafés, designer boutiques, and one antique shop packed with yellowed newspapers, old lamps, and vintage film posters. The prices were far beyond a student budget, so we browsed and moved on.
At the end of the lane, the shopping stopped and something much bigger started.
The Place Itself
Despite its name, there was never a fort here. What you get is a sprawling cluster of medieval ruins around a huge reservoir. Alauddin Khalji dug the tank in the 13th century to supply his city, Siri. About a century later Firuz Shah Tughlaq cleaned it out and surrounded it with a madrasa, mosque, pavilions and his own tomb, all dating to around 1354.
The L-shaped madrasa is the highlight, with its open-air, two-storey rooms looking over the water. Firuz Shah’s tomb sits at the bend, and the ruined mosque at the far end was my favourite. It’s built of red stone, and you can see how neatly the blocks were laid. Six pavilions are scattered about, three of them clustered together, probably tombs of the madrasa’s teachers.
Sunset and a Small Disaster
We stayed for the sunset, and it was one of the best I’ve seen in Delhi. Birds were heading home, ducks drifted on the lake, joggers did their laps, kids played cricket like it was a sacred duty, and elders sat quietly by the water. Hard to believe it was the middle of a busy capital.
Then we got lost. We’d dropped down into the complex from the madrasa roof, a jump of about ten feet, and found we couldn’t get back up. The staircase led to a locked grille. This was the era of basic Nokia phones, with no GPS, so we wandered out onto an unfamiliar, empty road as the light faded. When we finally reached a main road, a kind policeman pointed us towards the nearest railway station, and I’m still grateful to him.
Final Verdict
Go in the late afternoon, wear comfortable shoes, and keep an eye on closing time, preferably with a charged phone. Hauz Khas is peaceful, photogenic, and mostly cheap. Seven centuries on, it’s still standing, and I’d go back tomorrow, this time with a map.
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