Landmark · Delhi

Red Fort

In 60 seconds

The Red Fort — Lal Qila — is the walled palace-fortress of Shahjahanabad in Old Delhi, India: commissioned by Shah Jahan on 12 May 1639, completed on 6 April 1648, and the seat of the Mughal emperors until 1857. UNESCO-listed in 2007. ASI's own page gives entry at ₹50 for Indian, SAARC and BIMSTEC visitors (₹35 online) and ₹600 for other foreign visitors (₹550 online), under-15s free, with hours from sunrise to 9 p.m. — though the palace buildings empty in the late afternoon and the practical window is the morning. Closed on Mondays. Allow two hours. The Prime Minister has addressed the country from its Lahori Gate on every Independence Day since 1947, which is the other reason it matters, and the reason the security queue is what it is.

Fees & timings

CHECKED AGAINST OFFICIAL SOURCES · AUGUST 2026

Entry — foreign visitors	₹600 at the counter · ₹550 online
Entry — Indian, SAARC & BIMSTEC	₹50 at the counter · ₹35 online
Children under 15	Free
Hours	ASI's page says sunrise to 21:00; the palaces effectively wind down mid-afternoon
Closed	Mondays
Museums	The Kranti Mandir museums are a separate, dearer combined ticket — ask at the counter
Allow	2 hours

Spot a change on the ground? Tell us — we fix it in days.

ASI's page lists no closed day; every practical source, and the fort itself, closes on Monday. Plan around that, and around the security screening at Lahori Gate, which is thorough and slow on weekends and around Independence Day.

Paradise, in a line of water

A marble channel called the Nahr-i-Bihisht — the Stream of Paradise — once ran the length of the riverfront pavilions, from the Shah Burj through the Diwan-i-Khas, the Khas Mahal, the Rang Mahal and the Mumtaz Mahal, cooling each room in turn. It is dry now, and most visitors walk over the shallow marble bed without seeing it. Above the corner arches of the Diwan-i-Khas is the couplet of Amir Khusrau: if there be paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this. The hall it was written in lost its silver ceiling to the Marathas and its throne to Nadir Shah.

The India Unfolded edit

Four things to look at, that nobody points out

The scales of justice

On the north screen of the Tasbih Khana in the Khas Mahal, carved in marble and pierced so that light comes through it: a pair of scales hanging above a crescent moon, among stars and clouds. The mizan-i-adl — the emperor's justice, advertised in the wall of the room where he prayed.

A lotus cut from one block

In the centre of the Rang Mahal is a fountain basin shaped as an open lotus, carved from a single piece of marble. The Stream of Paradise surfaced here, in the middle of the hall, and the flower is what it came up through.

The wall that annoyed the emperor

A screen wall about ten and a half metres high stands in front of Lahori Gate and forces the entrance into a dog-leg. Aurangzeb added it for defence. Shah Jahan — by then his prisoner in Agra — is said to have written that it was a veil thrown over a beautiful face. The remark is repeated everywhere and nobody has pinned down the source; the wall, and the plausibility of the irritation, are both real.

The last Mughal building

At the north end, in the Hayat Bakhsh Bagh, a red sandstone pavilion sits in the middle of a tank: the Zafar Mahal, built by Bahadur Shah Zafar around 1842. It is the last Mughal building in the last Mughal fort, put up fifteen years before the dynasty ended in this courtyard.

What isn’t true

“Anangpal Tomar built the Red Fort”

False

This circulates widely and confuses two red forts. Anangpal Tomar was an eleventh-century Tomar king, and what he built was Lal Kot — the first walled city of Delhi, twenty-odd kilometres south of here, whose ramparts survive in Sanjay Van and around the Qutb complex. The Red Fort was begun by Shah Jahan in 1639, some six hundred years later.

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