Jaisalmer Fort Guide: Timings, Tickets, What to See and When to Go

Jaisalmer Fort is not a monument you walk around. It is a neighbourhood with roughly three thousand residents inside walls built in 1156, which makes it one of a handful of living forts left anywhere in the world. There are scooters in the lanes, laundry on the ramparts and school children walking home past 12th-century bastions.

Most guests visit it on the way to or from the desert. Here is how to do that well.

Timings and tickets

• The fort itself: open all day, every day, and free. It is a residential neighbourhood, so there is no gate and no closing time.
• The Jain temple complex: 8:00am to 12:00pm for non-worshippers. This is the tightest window of the day and the most common thing people miss.
• Fort Palace Museum: 9:00am to 6:00pm, around 500 rupees for foreign visitors and 100 rupees for Indian nationals, audio guide included.
• Patwon Ki Haveli: 9:00am to 5:00pm, roughly 100 rupees, and worth it for the stone lattice work.

Prices at government sites are revised periodically, so treat these as a guide rather than gospel.

The five things worth your time inside

1. The Jain temples

Seven interconnected temples built between the 12th and 16th centuries, carved in the same honey sandstone as the rest of the fort. The density of the carving is the point — every surface, including ceilings you have to lie back to see properly. Remove leather items at the entrance. Photography is allowed in most areas for a small fee.

2. The ramparts at sunset

Ninety-nine bastions run around the fort. The western side catches the last light and looks out over the old city and the desert beyond it. Arrive an hour before sunset, find a spot, and watch the whole hill turn from yellow to orange to deep gold. This is the single best free thing to do in Jaisalmer.

3. Patwon Ki Haveli

Just outside the fort walls, a cluster of five havelis built by a Jain trader family in the 19th century. The stonework on the facades is finer than anything inside the fort. Go early, because the alley in front is narrow and fills up.

4. The Fort Palace Museum

The former royal residence. Reasonable collection, but the real reason to buy the ticket is access to upper terraces and the views from them.

5. Simply getting lost

The lanes inside are barely two metres wide in places and they loop. Give yourself an unstructured hour. Every third doorway is a shop, and the further in you go the less aggressive the selling gets.

The best time of day

Go early, between 8am and 10:30am. The light is good, the Jain temples are open, the lanes are cool and the tour groups have not arrived. Come back for sunset on the ramparts if you can.

Avoid midday between March and September. The stone holds heat and the lanes have very little shade.

The uncomfortable part: staying inside the fort

You will see guesthouses and rooftop restaurants advertising rooms inside the walls. They are atmospheric, and there is a real argument against booking them.

The fort was built for a few hundred people and a desert climate. It now carries hotel plumbing, and the drainage system underneath is medieval. Water seepage has undermined foundations and caused sections of bastion to collapse. Conservation bodies including INTACH have campaigned for years to reduce water use inside the walls, and Jaisalmer Fort has appeared on watch lists of endangered heritage sites.

Eating at a rooftop restaurant is fine. Sleeping inside and running a shower twice a day is the part that adds up. We suggest staying in the old city below the fort or out at the desert camp, and visiting the fort on foot. This is also, for what it is worth, the cheaper option.

Getting there from the desert camps

From the Sam Sand Dunes area, the fort is 42km and about 45 minutes on a decent road. If you are staying with us, the natural sequence is:

1. Check out after breakfast, drive in, reach the fort by 9:30am.
2. Jain temples, then wander the lanes, then Patwon Ki Haveli.
3. Lunch on a rooftop with a fort view.
4. Gadisar Lake in the afternoon, which is ten minutes away and gorgeous in low light.

We arrange transfers for guests doing exactly this. It also works in reverse: fort in the morning on arrival day, camp by late afternoon in time for the sunset camel safari.

Combine it with

• Gadisar Lake, a 14th-century reservoir ringed by sandstone pavilions. Best at 7am or an hour before sunset.
• Kuldhara, the abandoned village 35km out, covered in our Kuldhara guide.
• Bada Bagh, a set of royal cenotaphs on a ridge, ten minutes from town and excellent at sunset if the fort is too crowded.

For a full day-by-day plan that fits the fort, the dunes and the outlying sites together, see our one, two and three day Jaisalmer itineraries. More on the other landmarks around the city is in the Jaisalmer section of our home page.