Shaniwar Wada

Shaniwar Wada was the seat of the Peshwas — the de facto rulers of the Maratha Empire — from its completion in 1732 until 1818, when the British captured it and ended Peshwa rule. Founded by Bajirao I, it was originally a seven-storey palatial complex of teak, brass-fitted gates, marble floors, and ornate fountains, the largest non-coastal residential fortification in 18th-century India. In 1828 a great fire — its cause never satisfactorily established — destroyed the wooden interior buildings and reduced the complex to its stone shell. What survives is the curtain wall (with its surviving 21-foot bastions and arrow-slits), the five gates of which the Delhi Darwaza is the principal, and the foundation outlines of the inner palace blocks. The Delhi Darwaza's outer face still bears the elephant-spike mountings designed to break a charging-elephant assault. A sound-and-light show in the evenings (English Saturday/Sunday, Marathi other nights) tells the Peshwa story including the supposed haunting of the fort by Narayan Rao Peshwa (assassinated 1773 at the age of 19). Allow 90 minutes for the daytime visit.