Overview
Bangalore (Bengaluru) is India's technology capital and its most temperate big city — a high, green metropolis of parks and old palaces where the pleasures are climate, food, drinking and easy access to the rest of southern India rather than a monument checklist.
Travel
Bangalore sits at nearly a thousand metres on the Deccan plateau, and almost everything distinctive about it follows from that altitude. The climate is mild where the rest of the country is punishing, which is why the city grew up around gardens and why so much of life here happens outdoors on a terrace or under trees — and it is a fair part of why the technology industry chose it and made it India's most cosmopolitan, most prosperous and youngest-feeling large city. Set your expectations accordingly. This is not a monument destination: it has a Tudor-Gothic palace, an eighteenth-century summer residence and a couple of significant temples, and none of them is why anyone stays. What Bangalore does better than anywhere else in India is ordinary daily pleasure — the botanical garden and the central park, the filter coffee and dosa institutions that have run for generations, the country's deepest craft-beer and pub scene, and neighbourhoods full of people eating out on a Tuesday. It is also the natural base for the south: the palace city of Mysore, the coffee hills of Coorg, the boulder ruins of Hampi and the Hoysala temples are all reachable from here. Come for the way the city lives, and treat what is around it as the sightseeing.
Bangalore's parks are the reason it was ever called the Garden City, and they remain its best hours. Lalbagh, laid out in the eighteenth century under Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan, spreads across some 240 acres of lawns, lakes and rare trees, with a Victorian glasshouse modelled on the Crystal Palace, a famous twice-yearly flower show, and — at its centre — a granite outcrop that is among the oldest exposed rock on the planet. Cubbon Park, in the middle of town, is the everyday one: shaded avenues and old trees threaded between the red Gothic government buildings, the state library and the museums, and full each morning of walkers, joggers and people simply sitting. Both are best in the cool of early morning or late afternoon, which is also when the city as a whole is at its most pleasant. The tree-lined avenues that connect them are being thinned by construction, which locals will tell you about at length — the green is not a static inheritance but something the city argues over.
Frequently asked questions
Diplomatic missions in Bangalore
5 embassies based in this city, grouped by region.
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