India
Mandawa
Gramophones and steam trains painted on mansion walls, a desert town turned open-air gallery.
The merchant painted his new gramophone on the mansion wall. Next to it, a train — another marvel he had seen in Calcutta. The havelis of Mandawa are open-air galleries where 19th-century traders recorded their wonder at the modern world in mineral pigment and lime plaster.
Mandawa, in Rajasthan's Shekhawati region, is the most accessible concentration of painted havelis in India — merchant mansions frescoed through the 18th and 19th centuries by Marwari traders grown rich in Calcutta, Bombay and beyond. Gods, British officers, trains, elephants and street scenes spill across the plaster together. Some havelis — the Morarka, the Goenka, the Jhunjhunwala — now run as museums or hotels, while others stand semi-abandoned, which is where the dreamlike part lives.
Solo
Take a sketchbook or a good lens — the fresco walls reward slow looking, courtyard by courtyard.
Couple
Stay a night in a haveli hotel and have the painted courtyards to yourselves after the day trips leave.
Friends
Split up across the lanes and compare finds — best gramophone, best steamship, best moustachioed officer.
- The frescoes catalogue technology as marvel — trains, bicycles and gramophones painted as novelties.
- Shekhawati is called India's open-air art gallery, and Mandawa is its densest, easiest room.
- Mythology and commerce share the walls — gods beside steamships, ledgers beside legends.
- Museum havelis anchor the visit; the semi-abandoned ones around them supply the atmosphere.
Papad ki sabzi — lentil wafers softened in tangy yogurt gravy — is the desert's survival dish made comfort.
The full Rajasthani thali arrives twenty-five dishes strong at the heritage hotels.
Guadalajara
Mexico
Orozco murals, market kitchens and mariachi nights animate Jalisco's largest city.
Fes el-Bali
Morocco
Cedar, cumin and thirty-day leather hang in lanes that refuse to tell you where you are.
Bordeaux
France
Eighteenth-century grandeur doubled in the Garonne's water mirror — a wine capital scrubbed back to gold.
Strasbourg
France
Half-timbered houses over still canals in a Petite France scented with sauerkraut and spice.
Khonoma
India
A warrior village clinging to terraced slopes that traded headhunting for deep forest conservation.
Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Island (Ross Island)
India
A British colonial headquarters slowly being digested by ficus roots in the Andaman Sea.
Hampi
India
A ruined empire scattered across a landscape of balancing granite boulders and banana plantations.
Bhimbetka
India
Prehistoric hunting scenes painted in blood-red ochre across sandstone shelters buried in thick teak forest.