Jaigarh Fort

The story of Jaigarh Fort

This is Jaigarh Fort, the rugged red-sandstone stronghold on Cheel ka Teela, looking down over Amer Fort and Maota Lake. Its most striking feature is the way it sits above the valley as the main defensive structure of the Amer complex, linked to Amer Fort by subterranean passages and treated as one complex with it.

Raja Kakil Dev captured the Amber region from the Mina tribes and began construction of Jaigarh fort around the middle of the eleventh century. Over the centuries, later rulers added to it, including Maha Raja Jai Singh II, who added palace apartments to the complex. The fort is also known as Victory Fort, and it was built to protect the Amber Fort complex below.

The scale is part of what you notice as soon as you look along it. Jaigarh Fort runs 3 kilometres from north to south and is 1 kilometre wide. It is highly fortified, and the standing description of it notes thick walls of red sandstone, narrow and dark passages, and long walkways. The fort resembles Amer Fort in structural design, which makes sense because the two are physically and historically tied together.

One of the places to look for is the cannon called Jaivana. It was manufactured in the fort precincts and was then the world's largest cannon on wheels. That is the detail that makes this fort more than a lookout: it was a place for military power as well as defence. The complex also includes three entry points named Awani Gate, Sagari Gate and Doongar Gate, and the Awani Gate has a subterranean tunnel connecting Amer Fort and Jaigarh Fort.

Jaigarh Fort stands within the wider Amer setting in Jaipur, Rajasthan, India, and the heritage context matters because the fort and Amer Fort were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Centre in 2013. Today it is a fort, a museum site, and a viewpoint, with opening hours from 09:00 hours to 18:30 hours throughout the week.

If you want the clearest sense of the place, follow the line of the walls and then look back toward Amer Fort below. That relationship between the hilltop fort and the palace-fort complex beneath is the whole story here, and it is still visible from where you are standing.