Why is Jaisalmer called the Golden City?

One stone, one city

The Trikuta ridge that Rawal Jaisal fortified in 1156 is sandstone, and the Bhatis built with what was under their feet. Ninety-two of the fort's ninety-nine bastions were raised or rebuilt in it between 1633 and 1647. The merchants who grew rich on the caravan tolls built their havelis in the same stone from the same quarries, and the town below followed. There is no other material to speak of — no marble, very little brick — so the entire city sits in one colour range.

That is unusual even in Rajasthan. Jaipur is pink by decree and paint; Jodhpur's blue is limewash renewed every spring. Jaisalmer's gold is geology, and it will still be there when the last bucket of paint has run out.

The stone that carves like wood

The same sandstone is the reason the city is so extravagantly carved. It takes a fine cut and holds it, which is how the jharokhas of Patwon ki Haveli came to be carved to the thickness of lace and have survived two centuries of desert wind. Look closely at any facade and you are looking at the reason the colour and the ornament go together — one material made both possible.

When it is golden and when it is not

In flat midday light the stone is a pale yellow-grey and the city can look washed out — which surprises people who arrived expecting the postcard. The gold is a property of low sun. From the first hour after sunrise the east-facing bastions catch fire from the bottom up; in the last hour before sunset the whole fort goes the colour of honey and the town below it turns amber. Our Shot List puts the fort-from-the-lake frame at dawn and the dune frame at dusk for exactly this reason.

Overcast days flatten it completely. If you have one grey morning, spend it inside the Jain temples, where the carving does not need the sun.

How a film fixed the name

The epithet is older than any single source we can point to — the stone has always looked like this — but it was fixed in the modern imagination by Satyajit Ray. His 1974 film Sonar Kella, 'the golden fortress', was set here and made the fort a pilgrimage for generations of Bengali travellers, who remain a large share of Jaisalmer's visitors fifty years on. Ask a Bengali family on the ramparts why they came and the answer is often the film before it is the fort.

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