JAIPUR
Hire the on-site guide (~₹200-300, negotiate) — the sundials and instruments are meaningless without an explanation of how they work; without one most visitors walk through in 15 minutes and miss the point entirely.
Commissioned by Sawai Jai Singh II, an avid astronomer as well as ruler, and built between 1728 and 1734, this is the largest and best preserved of five observatories he constructed across northern India. It contains nineteen masonry astronomical instruments, including the Samrat Yantra, a giant sundial roughly 27 meters tall that can tell time accurate to about two seconds, along with instruments for tracking celestial coordinates and predicting eclipses. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in 2010 for representing the culmination of pre-telescopic naked-eye observational astronomy in the Mughal era.
