Old Delhi is the most demanding day of the three and should therefore be the first, while your energy is highest and before heat, crowds and jet lag have had time to compound. Start early, before nine if you can manage it.
Begin at Jama Masjid, the congregational mosque Shah Jahan completed in the 1650s. Sightseers are generally admitted in two windows, roughly from early morning until around midday and again from early afternoon until early evening, with the prayer hall closed to visitors in between; Friday middays are busier and more restricted. There is no charge to enter the courtyard, but expect a fee of about INR 300 for a camera and around INR 100 to climb the southern minaret. The climb repays the money: from the top, the whole of walled Delhi lies below you, with the Red Fort to the east, and the shape of the day ahead becomes obvious.
Come down into Chandni Chowk. The lanes running off it are a working wholesale district rather than a heritage set, and each has a trade: Kinari Bazaar for wedding trim, Dariba Kalan for silver, Khari Baoli for spices, which traders there describe as the largest spice market in Asia. A cycle-rickshaw costs very little and is genuinely the sane way to cover ground in lanes this narrow. Delhi's markets deserve a day of their own, so on a three-day trip treat this as a pass-through with two or three deliberate stops rather than an attempt at completeness.
Eat in the lanes beside the mosque. Karim's, trading since 1913 and founded by a cook whose family tradition holds that his forebears fed the last Mughal court, is the famous one, and the mutton korma and seekh kebab remain the reason to sit down. Al Jawahar, a few doors along, is the local alternative and is usually the calmer room of the two. A main course at either typically runs to somewhere around INR 250 to INR 450. Finish with fruit-stuffed kulfi at Kuremal Mohan Lal Kulfi Wale in the Chawri Bazaar quarter: mango when it is in season, otherwise pomegranate or jamun.
Save the Red Fort for mid-afternoon, when the light on the sandstone improves and the school groups have thinned. Entry is generally around INR 35 for Indian nationals and about INR 500 for foreign visitors, tickets are sold online, and the fort has historically been closed on Mondays, although reporting in 2026 suggested that closure may since have been dropped. Check before you build a Monday around it. Inside, give your time to the Diwan-i-Khas and the marble palaces along the eastern wall rather than to the museums.
The evening sound-and-light show is worth it only if you are not already exhausted. Most people are.
Day two works its way south through New Delhi and ends at Humayun's Tomb, which is the correct place to end it.
Start at Gurudwara Bangla Sahib, near Connaught Place, where the kitchens serve free langar to thousands of people a day. Heads must be covered and shoes left outside, and the volunteer-run kitchen is open to visitors who want to watch the rotis being turned out by the hundred. Then walk or take a short ride to Agrasen ki Baoli, a stepwell of uncertain origin rebuilt in the fourteenth century, dropping in tiers below street level. It is free, it takes twenty minutes, and it is a startling piece of engineering to find a few minutes from the commercial centre of the city.
Move next to the ceremonial axis. Kartavya Path is the boulevard Lutyens and Baker laid out, running from the India Gate war memorial up to Rashtrapati Bhavan on Raisina Hill. India Gate commemorates Indian soldiers killed in the First World War and the Third Anglo-Afghan War, and the canopy behind it now holds a statue of Subhas Chandra Bose, installed in 2022. Tours inside Rashtrapati Bhavan need advance online booking and do not always run, so treat one as a bonus rather than a fixture. If you are visiting in late winter, check whether the Amrit Udyan gardens are open: they admit the public for a limited season, usually somewhere around February and March, free but requiring a booking.
The National Museum in central Delhi is the serious indoor stop on this stretch, with Harappan bronzes, Buddhist relics and a strong miniature painting collection. It is generally closed on Mondays. Its holdings are slated to move to the new Yuge Yugeen Bharat museum in the North and South Blocks over the coming years, in phases, so confirm what is where before you go.
Spend the late afternoon in the Lodhi estate. Lodhi Garden is free and holds the domed tombs of the Sayyid and Lodi sultans among joggers and parakeets. Lodhi Art District, in the residential colony beside it, carries some sixty murals commissioned from Indian and international artists by the St+art India Foundation since 2015, and takes an unhurried hour on foot.
End at Humayun's Tomb, the Mughal garden tomb of the 1560s that set the template the Taj Mahal would later refine, inscribed by UNESCO in 1993. The complex is open roughly dawn to dusk, and the last two hours of light are the ones to have. Adjacent Sunder Nursery, a restored Mughal-era park with monuments of its own, keeps far longer hours, typically from early morning until late in the evening, and the Humayun's Tomb Site Museum, a largely subterranean building opened in 2024, stays open into the evening and closes on Mondays.
If your day two falls on a Thursday, walk into Nizamuddin Basti afterwards for qawwali at the shrine of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, sung after the Maghrib prayer, roughly from six in the evening onwards. There is no ticket. Leave your shoes at the stalls, cover your head, expect to be asked for donations, and be aware that women are not admitted beyond the verandah of the shrine itself.
The south is where Delhi started, and it is the day that two-day itineraries lose.
Be at the Qutub Minar complex early. The victory tower, about seventy-three metres of it, was begun at the end of the twelfth century by Qutb al-Din Aibak and finished by his successors. The Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque beside it was built partly from the columns of demolished temples, which is plainly legible in the carving and repays a slow look. You cannot climb the minaret; it has been closed to visitors since a fatal stampede in 1981. Entry runs to roughly INR 35 for Indian nationals and around INR 550 for foreign visitors at the time of writing, booked online.
Then walk out of the ticketed enclosure and into Mehrauli Archaeological Park, which is free, largely empty, and for a good number of visitors the better half of the morning. Around 200 acres hold more than a hundred structures spanning eight centuries: the ruined tomb of Balban, whose arch is often described as the earliest true arch built in India; the walls of Lal Kot, which the Archaeological Survey treats as the oldest surviving fort in Delhi; and the Jamali Kamali mosque and tomb of the 1520s, whose painted and tiled burial chamber is frequently locked, and worth asking the caretaker about.
Break for lunch in Hauz Khas, fifteen minutes north. The complex there is free to enter and holds a fourteenth-century reservoir, a madrasa and the tomb of Firuz Shah Tughlaq, with the wooded Deer Park alongside and the restaurants of Hauz Khas Village directly behind. The village's late-night bar scene has quietened considerably from its peak a decade ago, but it remains an easy lunch with a view over the tank.
Give the rest of the afternoon to craft or shopping, whichever suits. Dilli Haat near INA is a permanent crafts market with rotating state stalls and regional food counters, and charges a small entry fee of around INR 30. Khan Market is the bookshop-and-boutique end of the scale, and considerably pricier.
For a last dinner, two heavily awarded kitchens sit within reach of this route: Indian Accent at The Lodhi hotel, which the Asia's 50 Best Restaurants list has ranked repeatedly, and Bukhara at the ITC Maurya, which has been grilling North-West Frontier food since the 1970s. Both need booking well in advance, often weeks, and both are expensive by Indian standards. Budget somewhere upwards of INR 5,000 a head with drinks.
