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Stuart Forster celebrates Gulf Air’s new daily flights to Hyderabad – launching at the beginning of this month – with a round-up of the southern Indian city’s top-ten unmissable landmarks
1 Hussain Sagar
This man-made lake sits between Hyderabad, the old city, and to the north, Secunderabad, the new city. Locals refer to the 400-year-old reservoir, built to meet the water requirements of the growing city, as the Bund Tank. As the sun begins to set each evening, locals come to stroll by the waterside and enjoy views from Tank Bund Road, or eat ice creams in the lakeside parks. Since 1992, a 17.5m tall statue of Buddha has stood on an island in the lake. Boat trips to the Buddha statue run from a jetty in Lumbini Park.
2 Hyderabadi cuisine
Hyderabad is often regarded as the point where north and south India meet. Anyone looking for evidence to back this up need look no further than the local cuisine, which mixes indigenous southern flavours with mutton-heavy Muslim Mughal cooking imported from the north. Mustard seeds, nuts, chillies and curry leaves are favoured local ingredients, and the city’s known throughout India for the spiciness of its food. Try local specialities such as biryani at Dakshin in the ITC Kakatiya Sheraton and Towers Hotel or Firdaus at the Taj Krishna Hotel.
3 Tombs of the Qutub Shahi kings
Quli, first of the Qutub Shahi kings, was originally a horse trader from Persia. He founded an Indian dynasty that lasted 169 years (1518-1687) and made Golconda his capital. At a place known as Ibrahim Bagh, 1.5km from Golconda Fortress, are 82 tombs of which those of the Qutub Shahi rulers are the largest and most impressive. Now faded, they were once brightly coloured in turquoise and green.
4 Lad Bazaar
Mall culture has infiltrated Hyderabad but the most fun shopping is still to be had in Lad Bazaar, in the heart of the old town. Its cramped lanes abound with stalls selling everything from sandals to silks. Look out for appliquéd, heavily sequined skirts, bags and belts set with sparkling mirrors and tiny beads made by local Banjara gypsies, and also traditional Hyderabadi glass and stone-studded bangles.
5 Cyberabad
According to a recent survey, almost a quarter of all Indian software engineers hail from Andhra Pradesh, the state of which Hyderabad is capital. This is the IT centre of India – so much so that the area around Madhapur, west of the city, now goes by the name of Cyberabad. Here’s where you find the Hyderabad Information
Technology and Engineering Consultancy City, or HI-TEC City for short. It even has its own police force, the Cyberabad Metropolitan Police, which patrols an area of 3,600km2 administering to some 2.6 million people.
6 Salar Jung Museum
Only 70 years ago Hyderabad was the premier princely state in British India. The tenth and last “Nizam” was reputedly the richest man in the world; possessor of the famously huge, 185-carat Jacobi diamond, which he used as a paperweight. The diamond is just one of the 43,000 items on display here, which include exquisite bronzes, sculpture, jade carvings, furniture and jewellery from not just India but also Persia, Arabia, Syria and Egypt, not to mention more than 50,000 books and manuscripts.
7 Pearl city
Close to 50,000 kilos of pearls are traded in Hyderabad each year. It’s a centuries-old trade based on local skills in drilling and setting Gulf pearls – in the village of Chandanpet just outside the city, almost the entire population is engaged in this delicate art. You can see craftspeople at work, grading and stringing pearls, in the shops around the Lad Bazaar and the jewellery stores of Secunderabad. Multi-stringed necklaces are a speciality of the city.
8 Charminar
The four towers (char – four, minar – tower) of Hyderabad’s most famous landmark stand 56m tall. They were erected in 1591 to commemorate the end of an outbreak of plague. Climb the narrow, spiral staircase to reach a rooftop gallery where you find the city’s oldest mosque, now no longer in use. Very much in use is the nearby Mecca Masjid, one of India’s largest mosques (room for 10,000 worshippers in the court-yard), and there’s an excellent view of it from up here.
9 Diamonds
There was a time when diamond mines of Golconda, in the Kistna Valley, were the most famous in the world. The Koh-i-Noor, once the largest known diamond in the world – now a part of the British crown jewels – was found here. So, too, was the 185-carat Darya-e-Noor, currently part of the crown jewels of Iran, the 410-carat Regent Diamond, now in the French Royal Treasury at the Louvre, and the Hope Diamond, a large, 45-carat, deep blue diamond, currently housed in the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in the US capital Washington DC and legendary for the curse it supposedly puts on whoever possesses it.
10 Golconda Fort
In a country not short on magnificent sights, Golconda is one of the most impressive fortresses in India. It predates the city of Hyderabad (which is 11km distant) and was from 1518 the powerbase of the Qutub Shahi dynasty. Entry is via the Balahisar Gate, famed for its acoustics, which guides demonstrate by clapping. The echoes can be heard up at the Durbar Hall, the highest point in the hilltop fortress, where the Qutub Shahi rulers once held public meetings.
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