Green Udaipur: gardens, lakesides and easy escapes

Udaipur's fame is marble and water, but the city's quieter genius is green: pleasure gardens built for queens, lakeside promenades cooled by evening breezes, and wooded Aravalli hills wrapping the whole valley. When the old-city lanes close in — and between mid-morning and late afternoon they do — these are the escapes. They are also, unlike the City Palace, nearly all free or close to it, and nearly all within a ten-minute autorickshaw ride of one another.

What follows is arranged the way a traveller would actually use it: the order to do things in, the hour that makes each one work, roughly what it costs, and the handful of places outside the city that justify hiring a car.

Key facts

• Best green hours: the first two hours after sunrise and the last two before sunset
• Time needed: one unhurried day for the city gardens, two if you add the ridge and a lake outside town
• Getting around: autorickshaws reach everything inside the city in minutes; agree the fare before you get in
• Season note: the weeks after the monsoon, roughly late September into November, turn the surrounding hills startlingly green
• Where to base yourself: the ghats around Gangaur Ghat and Hanuman Ghat put you walking distance from Doodh Talai and a short ride from Fateh Sagar

How to order the day

Udaipur's green places are not equally good at all hours, and the difference is not marginal — it is the difference between a garden you remember and a garden you photograph and forget. The formal gardens are morning places. They open early, the fountains run for almost nobody, and the light comes in low through the old trees. By late morning the tour coaches have arrived and the marble is glaring.

The water is an evening thing. Fateh Sagar's promenade fills after about four in the afternoon and stays full until well after dark. The ridge above the city is strictly a sunset proposition, because the whole point is watching the light go out of the lake system below.

So a good single day runs: Saheliyon Ki Bari at opening, Gulab Bagh mid-morning while it is still the locals' garden, a long gap over the hottest hours spent indoors or on a shaded ghat, then Doodh Talai and the ropeway in the late afternoon, and either Fateh Sagar or the Sajjangarh ridge for sunset. If you have two days, put Badi Lake at sunrise on the second and keep the ridge for that evening.

Saheliyon Ki Bari, the garden of the maidens

The garden most visitors come away talking about sits in the north of the city, tucked just below the embankment of Fateh Sagar Lake. It was built in stages through the first third of the eighteenth century under Maharana Sangram Singh II as a retreat for the royal women — by the familiar telling, for a queen and the forty-eight attendants who came with her. Lotus pools, marble kiosks, carved elephants, and fountains that mimic rainfall.

The engineering is the part worth understanding before you go. There is no pump. The garden was deliberately sited below the lake so that the water falls under its own weight, which is why the fountains have a soft, uneven, rain-like quality rather than the hard jet of a modern installation. Some of the smaller jets are turned on for groups rather than running continuously, so if the pools look still when you arrive, wait rather than leave.

Entry is nominal — expect to pay something on the order of a few rupees for Indian visitors and around fifty rupees for foreign visitors, though the posted rate changes. Gates typically open around eight in the morning and close around six in the evening, with last entry usually about half an hour before; hours shift with the season, so confirm at the gate. Give it forty-five minutes to an hour. Come at opening. By eleven it is a different, busier place.

Gulab Bagh, the city's green commons

Udaipur's grand public garden — properly Sajjan Niwas, universally Gulab Bagh — was laid out under Maharana Sajjan Singh in the early 1880s on a substantial spread of ground east of Lake Pichola, near the City Palace. Rose beds, heavy old shade trees, wide walking circuits, and a steady traffic of residents doing laps before the heat arrives.

It is less a sight than a habit, which is exactly its charm, and it rewards a different kind of visiting: no itinerary, no ticket queue, just an hour of walking under trees while the city wakes up. Inside the grounds you will also find the Saraswati Library, housed in the building that was once the Victoria Hall Museum, and the Navlakha Mahal. A miniature train, the Luv Kush Express, runs a circuit for children.

Entry to the garden is a token amount — think in the region of twenty-five rupees, with a small extra charge if you are carrying a camera. Gates usually open around eight and close around six. There is a small zoo on the grounds, historic but modest; the larger collection of animals is now at the biological park below Sajjangarh, and if your time is short the zoo here is the thing to skip.

If you are already on this side of town, the Ahar cenotaphs are a short ride further east and belong to the same quiet register: several hundred memorial structures spread over an open, grassy site, including the nineteen domed chhatris raised for nineteen maharanas of Mewar. Entry is free and the site is generally accessible from around dawn to dusk; the small archaeological museum alongside keeps shorter hours and is usually closed on Fridays. Almost nobody goes. It is one of the calmest half-hours in the city.

The Fateh Sagar lakefront and the island in the middle of it

Locals treat the promenade along Fateh Sagar as their seafront: chai and snack carts, families along the parapet, pedal boats below, and a slow drift of people that begins in the late afternoon and does not thin out until long after dark. There is no ticket and no schedule. You simply walk it, and the further north you go, the fewer people there are.

The island garden of Nehru Park, out in the middle of the lake, was closed for years and reopened in September 2025 after a long municipal renovation that added a musical fountain, new planting, better seating and a cafeteria. The city has since been extending its evening hours, with the aim of keeping it open into the late evening — a moving target, so ask at the jetty rather than trusting a printed timing. It is reachable only by boat. Expect motor-boat crossings in the region of two hundred and fifty rupees per person and speedboats appreciably more, with foreign visitors typically charged roughly double the local rate, and a separate small garden entry on top. Boats have historically run from the morning until around late afternoon; the extended-hours push may have changed that.

On the eastern bank, Moti Magri — Pearl Hill — carries the Maharana Pratap memorial in terraced gardens, including a small Japanese-style rock garden, and gives you the lake from above without a climb worth calling a climb. It usually opens around nine in the morning and closes around six, for a small entry fee; quoted figures vary widely between sources, so take the number at the counter as the real one. There is a light and sound show most evenings for a modest extra charge.

Doodh Talai, the hillside terraces and the ropeway

Beside Lake Pichola's southern corner, the small Doodh Talai lake is ringed by terraced municipal gardens climbing the hillside — Deendayal Upadhyay Park among them — an easygoing tangle of paths, viewpoints and bougainvillea that costs almost nothing to wander.

From the park, the Mansapurna Karni Mata ropeway lifts you a little under four hundred metres of cable to the temple on the ridge above in about five minutes. It gives the widest view over the lake system that you can reach in Udaipur without walking uphill, which is why it is busy at sunset. Tickets run in the region of a hundred and twenty to a hundred and fifty rupees return, and it typically operates from mid-morning until late evening — unusually late for the city, which makes it a good post-dinner option if your afternoon got away from you. The temple itself is free; you are paying only for the cable car. Queues build sharply in the half hour before sunset, so go up early and come down late rather than the reverse.

Sajjangarh: take the sanctuary seriously, the palace lightly

Sajjangarh, the whitewashed Monsoon Palace, floats on a ridge west of the city inside a wildlife sanctuary of dry deciduous forest. The drive up passes through genuinely wild country — langur troops, peafowl, chital, nilgai, the occasional wild boar, and a documented plant list running to a couple of hundred species — and the view over the entire lake system is the one most Udaipur drivers will steer you toward at sunset.

Be clear about what you are buying. The palace interior is largely empty rooms; the terrace, the approach road and the light are the reasons to go. The ticket bundles sanctuary and palace access, and quoted rates sit somewhere in the range of a hundred and twenty to a hundred and sixty-five rupees for Indian visitors and around five hundred rupees or a little more for foreign visitors, with a hefty extra charge for video. Posted timings vary by source and by season — generally from mid-morning to somewhere between late afternoon and early evening — and private vehicles are commonly stopped near the gate in favour of a shuttle for the final climb. Confirm both when you buy the ticket, because arriving at the gate an hour before sunset only to find the last shuttle has gone is a common and avoidable disappointment.

At the foot of the same hill, Sajjangarh Biological Park is a genuinely different proposition from an old-fashioned city zoo: large naturalistic enclosures holding tigers, lions, leopards, sloth bears, wolves and deer, set in forest, with golf-cart circuits and rental cycles for the main loop. It usually opens around nine and closes in the late afternoon, and is generally closed on Tuesdays. Entry is around forty-odd rupees for Indian visitors and in the region of three hundred rupees for foreign visitors. Allow two hours, and go early — the animals, like everyone else here, disappear in the middle of the day.

Badi Lake and the hill above it

A short drive beyond Fateh Sagar, this eighteenth-century reservoir sits ringed by hills with barely a building in sight. It is roughly twelve kilometres from the centre, about half an hour by road, and it remains the easiest complete escape from the city: silence, water, sky.

The short climb above the western bank, known to everyone locally as Bahubali Hills, is a dirt trail of fifteen to twenty minutes that delivers a flat boulder-topped ridge looking straight down the length of the lake. It is not a trek in any serious sense, but it wants proper shoes rather than sandals. For sunrise you need to be starting up well before half past six.

The practical warning matters more than the hike. There is nothing at the top — no shops, no shade, no returning autorickshaws. Negotiate a round trip with waiting time built in, which tends to land somewhere in the three to five hundred rupee range by auto, and keep your driver there. Travellers who have sent their driver away have ended up walking a long way back toward Rani Road. Carry water.

Three green detours that justify a car

Ubeshwar Ji, roughly twenty kilometres out, is a Shiva temple set in a fold of the Aravallis where seasonal streams run down the rock. The forest department has been building out picnic infrastructure here, including check dams intended to hold small waterfalls and a plantation park with a watchtower. It only really works during and just after the rains; in April it is a dry ravine with a temple in it.

Menar, about forty-five kilometres east, is a farming village with twin tanks that has been widely written up in the Indian press as a bird village. Shooting has been prohibited there by village custom for generations, on religious grounds, and the birds show it — they let you approach in a way wild birds in India generally do not. More than a hundred resident and migratory species have been recorded, sarus cranes among them, along with vultures. It is a winter destination, roughly October through March, and it is worth going with someone local who knows which tank is holding water.

Jaisamand, also called Dhebar Lake, lies about fifty kilometres south, a drive of an hour and a half or so. Built in the seventeenth century and often described as one of the largest artificial lakes in Asia, it holds seven islands and is wrapped by a wildlife sanctuary of well over a hundred and fifty square kilometres. Boat rides are cheap — think tens of rupees for Indian visitors, rather more for foreign ones. Budget around three hours at the lake itself, which makes it a comfortable half-day out rather than a rushed stop.

Closer in, Shilpgram sits about three kilometres west near Havala village: a rural arts and crafts complex of traditional dwellings spread across a large wooded site against the Aravallis. Entry runs around thirty rupees for Indian visitors and around fifty for foreign ones; it typically opens late morning and runs to early evening, with the craft bazaar starting around midday.

Getting around, and roughly what it costs

Inside the city, autorickshaws handle everything above. Short hops are usually a matter of fifty rupees or so and should rarely exceed a hundred; agree the figure before you get in, because meters are largely theoretical here. Ride-hailing apps operate in Udaipur and often undercut the negotiated auto fare, which is a useful sanity check even if you end up taking the auto.

For the ridge, Badi Lake, or anything beyond, hire a car and driver for a half or full day rather than paying per leg. The maths favours it as soon as you are doing two out-of-town stops, and it solves the waiting problem at Badi entirely. Cycling is viable around Fateh Sagar in the cool months and unpleasant in the hills at any time of year.

When in the year this works, and when it does not

The monsoon arrives around mid-June and runs into late September, with July and August carrying most of the rain. That rain is what makes the hills green, and the reward comes afterwards: from late September through November the Aravallis around the city are genuinely lush, the lakes are full, the light is clean, and the gardens are at their best. If you can only choose one window, choose that one.

October through February is the broader good season — dry, warm days and cool nights, with January mornings genuinely cold by Rajasthani standards. March into May is the season to avoid for this particular article's purposes. Daytime highs climb past thirty-five degrees and approach forty, the gardens brown off, Badi Lake drops, and the middle of the day becomes unusable. You can still visit Udaipur in April, but you will be doing it indoors between ten and five, and the green city will be mostly a memory of what it looks like in November.

During the rains themselves, the ridge road and the hill trails are slippery and views come and go behind cloud. Ubeshwar Ji is the exception — it is the one place on this list that is better wet than dry.

What to skip

The Monsoon Palace interior, if you are choosing between it and daylight; go for the road and the terrace. The Gulab Bagh zoo, if you are also going to Sajjangarh Biological Park. Midday boating on Fateh Sagar, which is hot, glaring and half the price of the experience you would have at six. And any garden at all between about eleven and three in April or May.

Tip: Combine Saheliyon Ki Bari at opening with the Sajjangarh ridge at sunset — the two ends of Udaipur's green spectrum, the formal and the wild, in one day, with the hot hours spent on a shaded ghat in between.

The palaces will still be there tomorrow. Some days in Udaipur belong to the trees.