Things to do in Ahmedabad

Neighborhood · Old City, east of the Sabarmati

Six hundred years of dense timber-fronted housing clusters, each entered through a single gate, which made Ahmedabad India's first UNESCO World Heritage City in 2017.

Local tip: The municipal corporation's heritage walk leaves from Swaminarayan Temple in Kalupur at around eight in the morning and ends at the Jama Masjid. Go on a weekday. Look for the chabutro — communal bird feeders on carved pillars in the courtyards, which are the detail nobody photographs.

Landmark · Ashram Road, west bank

Gandhi's base from 1917 to 1930 and the starting point of the Salt March, kept deliberately austere.

Local tip: Free, and quiet in the early morning before the coach parties. The archive and the letters are the substance; Hriday Kunj, the two-room house he actually lived in, takes five minutes and is the point.

Food · Old City

A vegetable market by morning, a jewellery market by day, and from about nine at night one of India's great street-food squares.

Local tip: It genuinely changes function three times in twenty-four hours. Go after ten at night for the ghee-drenched sandwiches and kulfi. Cash and UPI both work; the stalls are numbered and locals order by number.

Culture · 18 km north, toward Gandhinagar

A five-storey octagonal stepwell from 1499, descending into cool air and carved Indo-Islamic stonework.

Local tip: Twenty degrees cooler at the bottom than at the surface, which was the entire engineering point. Go at midday when the light drops straight down the shaft. It is on the way to GIFT City, so it pairs with a Gandhinagar trip.

Landmark · Lal Darwaja, city centre

A 1573 mosque whose western wall carries a stone lattice of an intertwined tree so fine it became the emblem of IIM Ahmedabad and of the city itself.

Local tip: Only two of the ten jali screens are the famous ones, and they are best from inside looking out in late afternoon. It sits on a traffic island in the middle of the city and most people drive past it daily without stopping.

Nature · 60 km south-west

A shallow 120-square-kilometre wetland and Ramsar site that fills with flamingos, pelicans and cranes from November to February.

Local tip: Barely known outside Gujarat and almost empty on weekday mornings. Go before seven, take a flat-bottomed boat with a local boatman rather than a package, and bring binoculars — the birds keep their distance and the water is knee-deep for hundreds of metres.