Islamabad: the city that was drawn before it was built
A capital laid out on a grid in the 1960s, with a national park at the top of it and almost every northern trip starting here.
Read itCity guides
Every city, and what it is for
A guide to each city we get asked about — how it came to be there, what is worth your time when you arrive, and the one thing it does better than anywhere else in the country.
1 guide
Islamabad Capital Territory
7 guides
Punjab
Lahore: a thousand years of capitals
Ghaznavid, Mughal, Sikh and British in turn — and the food, the gardens and the Walled City that each of them left behind.
Read itRawalpindi: the old city next door to the new capital
Islamabad's twin, and the one with the bazaars, the havelis and five hundred years of history behind it.
Read itMultan: the city of saints and blue tiles
One of the oldest continuously lived-in cities in Asia, with shrines that changed how the whole region builds.
Read itBahawalpur: palaces at the edge of the desert
The capital of a princely state that kept its own court until 1947, with a desert fort an hour out into the Cholistan.
Read itTaxila: where the Gandhara world kept its books
A UNESCO site half an hour from Islamabad, three cities deep, and arguably the oldest centre of learning in South Asia.
Read itMurree: the hill station the British built to escape the heat
A Victorian summer town at 2,291 metres, an hour from the capital, and the busiest snow in Pakistan.
Read itFaisalabad: a city laid out like a flag
Eight bazaars radiating from a clock tower, in a street plan drawn to echo the Union Jack — and the engine of Pakistan's textile trade.
Read it5 guides
Sindh
Karachi: from twenty-five huts to twenty million people
A fishing village in 1729, the British Empire's largest wheat port by 1914, and now the city that pays a third of Pakistan's tax.
Read itHyderabad: the city that built itself wind towers
Sindh's old capital, a bazaar several kilometres long, and rooftops designed to catch a breeze that arrives every afternoon.
Read itThatta: a capital, a mosque and the largest necropolis on earth
Makli holds hundreds of thousands of graves across several centuries, and the mosque next door has acoustics that carry a voice to the back without help.
Read itMohenjo-daro: a city with drains, 4,500 years ago
Built around 2500 BCE, planned on a grid, plumbed throughout, and abandoned for reasons nobody has settled.
Read itSukkur: the barrage that waters ten million acres
A colonial engineering project that turned a desert province into farmland, and two bridges over the Indus worth crossing slowly.
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Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
Peshawar: two and a half thousand years at the mouth of the Khyber
One of the oldest continuously lived-in cities in South Asia, and once home to a stupa that may have been the tallest building on earth.
Read itMardan: the monastery on the hill at Takht-i-Bahi
The best-preserved Buddhist monastic complex in all of what was Gandhara, standing on a ridge above the plain for two thousand years.
Read itAbbottabad: the green hills on the way north
A hill town at 1,256 metres in the Hazara valley, with more rain than anywhere else on this list and the road to Kaghan running through it.
Read itChitral: under Tirich Mir, at the end of the road
A former princely state behind the Lowari Pass, with its own language, a fort with a famous siege, and the Kalash valleys an hour away.
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Balochistan
Quetta: the fruit garden in the fortress valley
Pakistan's highest major city at 1,680 metres, ringed by mountains, and the orchard capital of the country.
Read itGwadar: the hammerhead on the Arabian Sea
Omani territory until 1958, a fishing town for most of its history, and a coastline that looks like nowhere else in the country.
Read itZiarat: juniper trees four thousand years old
The second-largest juniper forest in the world, at 2,543 metres, with some individual trees older than most civilisations.
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Azad Kashmir
Muzaffarabad: where the Neelum meets the Jhelum
The capital of Azad Kashmir, two forts facing each other across the water, and the doorway to the whole Neelum valley.
Read itTimeless beauty · Serene waters · Living culture
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