Ahmedabad Audio Tours

Ahmedabad was founded in 1411 by the sultan Ahmad Shah I beside the Sabarmati River, and in 2017 it became India's first city to receive UNESCO World Heritage status for its urban fabric. The reason is the pols -- a labyrinth of traditional housing clusters where dozens of families, bound by caste or profession, lived in interconnected courtyards with ornate wooden facades. They still exist in the old city east of the river, and walking through them is like stumbling into a living architectural museum that no one locked the door to.

The same river bank where Mahatma Gandhi built his Sabarmati Ashram in 1917 and launched the Salt March of 1930 is now a manicured promenade that locals jog along at dawn.

The Sidi Saiyyed Mosque, built in 1573, contains a stone lattice window of such intricate carving that Louis Kahn and Le Corbusier -- both of whom designed major buildings in Ahmedabad in the 1950s and 60s -- are said to have studied it. At Manek Chowk, the jewellery market by day becomes a street food bazaar by night, where vendors serve fafda, jalebis and Gujarati thali under bare bulbs until past midnight.