Why is Jaisalmer Fort still inhabited — and is it really the world's only living fort?

Why the people never left

The Bhatis built a city, not a citadel. The caravan economy that paid for the walls needed merchants, priests, craftsmen and their families inside them, and there was nowhere else for the town to be — the fort was the reason for the settlement and the settlement was the reason for the fort. When Jaisalmer's trade died in the nineteenth century the people did not decamp to a new town below; there was no new money to build one. They stayed where their houses were. The fort is inhabited today because it was never abandoned, which is a plainer answer than the one the guides give.

How many live there is genuinely uncertain. Figures in circulation run from around two thousand to four thousand, and no census separates the fort from the town. 'Nearly a quarter of the old city's population' is the safest thing anyone can say, and it is what we say.

The fort is sinking, and the reason is the taps

The hill's core includes a layer of mudstone that effectively dissolves in water. For eight hundred years that did not matter, because the fort had no running water. It was given piped supply in 1991 — and water use rose with nothing built to carry it away. Bastion and wall collapses date from after that. In August 2016 a large section of wall caved in, damaging three residential structures on the ramparts, attributed to post-monsoon seepage. Roughly eighty-odd of the fort's four-hundred-and-something buildings have collapsed since the 1980s; the exact counts vary by source, so we give neither as a hard number.

The most quotable fact is the rain: in the summer of 2007, twenty-two inches fell in three days on a place whose annual normal is about ten. Hotels, restaurants and shops inside the walls have been reported importing around fifty thousand gallons of water a day for something like half a million visitors a year. All of it goes into the hill.

What is being done

The World Monuments Fund placed the fort on its Watch list in 1996, 1998 and 2000, and funded stabilisation of the Pitching Wall and Bastion 38, largely complete from 2015–16. Its published position asks visitors and residents to scale back water use, especially running public taps. There is no enforceable ban on hotels inside the walls; guesthouses continue to trade and every major booking site will sell you one.

So the honest sentence is this: you can still book a room inside the fort, and we are asking you not to. That is India Unfolded's recommendation, grounded in the water mechanism — not a rule from UNESCO or the WMF, neither of which publishes one. Sleep below the walls and climb up at seven, when the fort belongs to the people who live there. The view of the golden walls at dawn is better from outside anyway.

What to look for when you are there

Near the lower walls, look for the subsidence scars — the honest cracks. The sinking fort is not a metaphor. Then walk the residential lanes behind the palace square at seven in the morning and watch the milk delivered up the same ramp that once stopped elephants: school uniforms, a temple bell, washing on the ramparts. This is the thing the phrase 'living fort' is trying to describe, and it is better than the phrase.

The fort was inscribed in 2013 as one of the six Hill Forts of Rajasthan on UNESCO's World Heritage list, alongside Chittorgarh, Kumbhalgarh, Ranthambore, Gagron and Amber. Rajasthan Tourism's own page mentions the listing without naming the group.

Keep going