Bangalore

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.

The heritage here is modest by Indian standards and worth seeing on that understanding. Bangalore Palace, built in the 1870s in Tudor-Gothic style with turrets and fretted woodwork, is a deliberate quotation of Windsor and still belongs to the former royal family; the interiors are the point rather than the exterior. Tipu Sultan's Summer Palace, a two-storey teak pavilion from the 1790s, is the older and quieter pleasure — ornamented, cool, and standing near the old fort and the roar of the City Market, which is itself the best reason to be in that part of town. In Basavanagudi, the Bull Temple holds an enormous Nandi carved from a single granite boulder, and the modern ISKCON complex on the northern edge draws large crowds. The state legislature, the Vidhana Soudha, is the city's monumental set piece: a vast granite building in a Dravidian-neoclassical hybrid, floodlit at night and best seen then, from outside, since the interior is not open to casual visitors.

How Indian food divides by region — and where the southern breakfast canon of dosa, idli and filter coffee sits within it — is set out in the India food guide. Bangalore's own contribution is a set of institutions that have been doing one thing for generations, and they are worth planning a morning around. MTR and Vidyarthi Bhavan are the famous two: queues out of the door, dosas that arrive crisp and heavy with ghee, and filter coffee served in a steel tumbler and dabarah that you pour between the two to cool. Karnataka's own cooking — its spicier meat dishes, its biryani traditions, the rice-and-ragi staples — is easiest to meet at the older canteens rather than the smart restaurants. For grazing, the stretch of VV Puram known as Food Street runs vegetarian snacks and sweets from late afternoon into the night. And then there is the other Bangalore, the young and international one: a modern-Indian and global restaurant scene that reflects a city where a large share of the population arrived from somewhere else.

Bangalore has been India's drinking city since long before craft beer arrived, and it now holds the country's deepest brewing culture by a distance. Microbreweries cluster thickly in Indiranagar and Koramangala and along the central strips, most of them brewing on site, and the range runs well beyond the standard lager into wheat beers, stouts and seasonal experiments that would not embarrass a brewpub anywhere. The reason it works here is again the climate: rooftops and terraces are usable most of the year, which is not true of Delhi or Chennai, and the whole scene is built around sitting outside. The city's licensing hours are earlier than visitors expect — last orders come around at a time that surprises people used to later cities — so an evening here starts earlier rather than running late. Beyond beer, the cocktail bars along the same streets are strong, and the old-school pubs on and around Church Street preserve the pre-boom version of the same habit.

The industry that made modern Bangalore is mostly invisible to a visitor: campuses on the ring roads and in Whitefield and Electronic City, an hour or more from the centre in traffic, and not places you would go. What the boom produced instead, in the districts nearer the middle, is where you will spend your evenings. Indiranagar and Koramangala are the two names to know — grid neighbourhoods of restaurants, breweries, boutiques and bookshops, walkable in a way that little else in the city is. MG Road, Brigade Road and Church Street form the older commercial core, busier and more chaotic, with Commercial Street's textile and jewellery shops just north of it. Jayanagar and Basavanagudi to the south are the older residential Bangalore, quieter, greener and better for the traditional canteens and the flower markets. The point of naming them is practical: this is a city where the neighbourhood you base yourself in determines your trip far more than any list of sights would suggest.

Bangalore's real sightseeing lies outside it, and the connections are good. Mysore, around three hours away, is the classic: a graceful royal city whose palace is among the grandest in India, lit up on Sunday evenings and during the autumn Dasara festival, with markets, gardens and a hilltop temple to fill the rest of a day or two. South-west, the coffee-growing hills of Coorg offer plantation homestays, waterfalls and cool misted mornings — the standard weekend escape for the city itself. Further out, the boulder-strewn ruins of the Vijayanagara capital at Hampi are a UNESCO site and one of the great landscapes of India, best given two nights rather than a rushed overnight, and the Hoysala temples at Belur and Halebidu carry the most intricate stone carving in the south. The wildlife parks at Bandipur and Nagarhole complete the range. All are practical from here, which is why many itineraries treat Bangalore as an arrivals hall with good dinners rather than a destination — a fair use of it, if an incomplete one.

Two things dominate moving around Bangalore: the traffic, which is genuinely among the worst in India and worsens sharply during the peaks, and the metro, which is the antidote where it reaches. The network now covers the central corridors and is expanding, and where your route matches a line it is quicker and calmer than anything on the road. Ride-hailing works everywhere and auto-rickshaws are ubiquitous, though negotiation over the meter is a local sport; app-based rickshaw bookings avoid it entirely. The airport is the other planning fact: Kempegowda International sits far to the north, and the journey into the city takes well over an hour in normal conditions and considerably more at the wrong time of day, with a dedicated bus service and taxis both available. Build that into arrival and departure days rather than discovering it. Within the neighbourhoods, walking is pleasant in a way it rarely is elsewhere in urban India — which is part of why Indiranagar and Koramangala have become the city's living rooms.