Mumbai

The Gateway of India, a basalt arch raised on the waterfront in 1924, is the city's postcard and the departure point for the Elephanta ferries; the crowd around it at any hour is part of the experience. Behind it stands the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, open since 1903 and a Mumbai landmark in its own right — its sea-facing lounge is a genuine institution for afternoon tea whether or not you are staying. Colaba Causeway runs south from the Gateway as the city's best-known shopping and backpacker strip: street vendors, antique dealers, cafés and bookstalls along a mile of pavement, with the restored Knesset Eliyahoo synagogue a short detour off it and Leopold Café — an old traveller institution — on the corner. Walk north instead and you reach the Kala Ghoda arts district, where the Jehangir Art Gallery runs free rotating exhibitions and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, in a domed Indo-Saracenic building, holds one of the country's best collections, from Indus Valley material to Mughal miniatures.

Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus is the most impressive building in the city and possibly the most impressive railway station anywhere: a Gothic cathedral crossed with an Indian palace, finished in 1888 after a decade of work, bristling with turrets, stained glass and carved stone animals — and still a working terminus moving millions of commuters a day, which is what makes it worth seeing rather than merely photographing. The streets around it hold the rest of the ensemble: the High Court, the university's Rajabai Clock Tower, and the Municipal Corporation Building, all still occupied by the institutions they were built for. Walk south along DN Road to see them in sequence. Nearby Crawford Market, a Norman Gothic market hall by the same architect as the terminus, has traded fruit, spice and general goods since the 1860s and remains resolutely wholesale rather than picturesque. Together with the Art Deco seafront across the maidan, this precinct carries Mumbai's UNESCO World Heritage listing as a Victorian Gothic and Art Deco ensemble.

Marine Drive curves for three and a half kilometres along the Arabian Sea and is the city's living room — joggers at dawn, cricket at noon, couples at sunset, families eating kulfi and roasted corn after dark, and the arc of streetlights that earned it the name Queen's Necklace. The buildings behind it matter as much as the view: the streets around the Oval Maidan hold one of the densest concentrations of Art Deco residential architecture anywhere, pastel façades with geometric motifs and nautical detailing adapted to a tropical climate in the 1930s. At the northern end, Girgaum Chowpatty is where the city comes for bhel puri at sunset — the food is the point, not the swimming. From the beach it is a short climb into Malabar Hill to reach the Banganga Tank, an ancient sacred pond ringed by temples and old houses in the middle of the city's most expensive high-rise district, which is as concentrated a piece of Mumbai's contradictions as exists.

How Indian street food works as a system — the specialist-stall economics, the city-by-city canons, the turnover rule that keeps it safe — is covered in the India food guide, which names Mumbai's own contribution. What belongs here is where to go. For the city's signature snacks: the stalls around Mithibai College for vada pav, Cannon Pav Bhaji near the terminus and the Juhu Beach stands after sunset for pav bhaji, and Elco on Hill Road for bhel and sev puri. The Bombay sandwich — beetroot, cucumber, potato, cheese and chutney grilled between slices — exists nowhere else and is worth trying from a busy corner cart. For meat, Mohammed Ali Road transforms into a night food market during Ramadan, with kebabs, nihari and malpua drawing the whole city, and Bademiya behind the Taj has served late-night seekh kebab rolls for generations; the sweet shops along the same road handle dessert. The one habit that matters: eat where the queue is local and the cooking is visible.

An hour across the harbour from the Gateway, Elephanta Island holds a UNESCO-listed cave temple complex cut into basalt between roughly the fifth and eighth centuries. The main cave's Trimurti — a three-headed Shiva some six metres high, representing creation, preservation and destruction — is among the finest ancient sculptures in India, and the relief panels around it show Shiva's cosmic dance and his marriage to Parvati in deep, confident carving. Ferries run from the Gateway through the morning and early afternoon, and the crossing itself is worth the ticket, threading between fishing boats and cargo ships. From the jetty a small train or a walk of just over a kilometre brings you to the foot of the stairs, and then it is about a hundred and twenty steps up to the caves. Allow three to four hours for the round trip. The caves close on Mondays, and weekdays are markedly quieter; the island also has a village, Portuguese-era cannon on the ridge and forest paths that almost nobody walks.

Mumbai produces more feature films a year than Hollywood does, and the industry is woven into the city's sense of itself. Film City in Goregaon holds the soundstages where much of it is shot, and several operators run guided tours that include set visits and, with luck, a live shoot. A less packaged version is simply to spend an evening in Bandra or Juhu, the seaside neighbourhoods where the industry lives and where crews turn up on ordinary streets. To watch rather than tour, the multiplexes screen the latest Hindi releases — subtitles are rare for mainstream films, and it matters less than you would think. For the history, the National Museum of Indian Cinema traces the industry from the first Bombay screening in 1896 and the first Indian feature in 1913 through to the present. Best of all, if the timing works: a screening at one of the restored single-screen Art Deco cinemas, which recreates the movie-palace experience the multiplexes replaced.

Dharavi is usually reduced in headlines to “Asia's largest slum”, which is both inaccurate and uninteresting. It is more usefully understood as a self-organised informal city of around a million people running thousands of businesses — leather, pottery, recycling, textiles, food processing, embroidery — with an annual output measured in hundreds of millions of dollars, packed into a couple of square kilometres beside Mumbai's financial district. If you visit, book through a community-led organisation that employs Dharavi residents as guides and reinvests its profits locally, rather than an operator selling a spectacle; reputable tours cover the industrial and residential areas and prohibit photographing people without consent. What visitors tend to report is not what they expected: the density of economic activity, the apprenticeship structures, and the schools, temples, mosques and cricket grounds fitted into the gaps. Its position next to the Bandra-Kurla financial complex is the city's central contradiction in a single sightline.

If the southern tip is Mumbai's colonial past, Bandra is its present. A former Portuguese fishing village — the Basilica of Our Lady of the Mount still draws a large September festival — it has become the city's most desirable neighbourhood, with cafés, galleries and boutiques along Pali Hill and Carter Road, street shopping on Linking Road, and the Bandra-Worli Sea Link arcing across the bay as the modern icon of the skyline, best seen from the Bandstand promenade. The eating is excellent and ranges from long-standing biryani houses to seafood restaurants with a view. North of Bandra, Juhu Beach is where the film industry lives and where the whole city turns out at sunset among cricket games, families and carts selling pav bhaji and shaved ice. Further north again, Andheri and Goregaon carry the studios and an increasingly good restaurant scene as the city's creative centre of gravity keeps shifting away from the old south.

Mumbai's suburban railway is the circulatory system — Western, Central and Harbour lines carrying millions of people a day along the peninsula's axis, and by far the fastest way to cover distance at most hours. First class costs several times the ordinary fare and is the sensible choice for visitors; avoid the morning and evening peaks entirely, when carriages reach a density that has to be experienced to be believed and is not a good first experience. The metro now supplements the old lines on several east-west corridors. Auto-rickshaws are not permitted in the southern city, so it is taxis and app-based cabs below Bandra and rickshaws above it. From the airport, prepaid counters and ride-hailing both work, and the journey time to the southern tip varies from an hour to three depending entirely on the hour you land. How the intercity picture works — trains between cities, domestic flights, the overnight options — is covered in the getting around India guide.

November to February is the comfortable season: warm, dry, and the months when the promenades and beaches are at their best. March to May is hot and increasingly humid as the sea air thickens. June to September is the southwest monsoon, and in Mumbai it is not a detail — it is a season with its own character. Rainfall arrives in quantities that flood low-lying roads, disrupt the suburban trains that everything depends on, and reshape the daily rhythm of the city; it is also genuinely cinematic, turning the seafront grey-green and filling the air with the smell of wet earth and frying. Travelling here in those months is entirely possible and considerably cheaper, but it requires flexibility: keep transfers and flight connections generous, expect a train line to fail on any given day, and treat an afternoon indoors as part of the plan rather than a loss.