The plan at a glance

The Victoria Memorial and the Indian Museum, then the flower market and Kumortuli, then Dakshineswar and the Great Banyan

Kolkata was three villages on a bend of the Hooghly when the East India Company settled there in 1690; by 1772 it was the capital of British India and by the nineteenth century the second city of the empire, which is why it has more Victorian public architecture than anywhere else in Asia. It was also where modern India began to think: the Bengal Renaissance, the Asiatic Society, the reformers and the novelists and the Tagores all came out of these streets, and the city has never stopped taking ideas seriously. The capital moved to Delhi in 1911 and the money followed, and what is left is a city of about fifteen million that is shabbier, cheaper, more crowded and considerably more interesting than the places that overtook it.

Day 1The Maidan: a marble memorial, the oldest museum in India and a cemetery that does the arithmeticVictoria Memorial · St. Paul's Cathedral · Indian Museum · South Park Street Cemetery · Eden Gardens and the Maidan5 sights · Transport between sights Day 2North Kolkata: a flower market at dawn, two family houses and the lane where the gods are madeHowrah Bridge and the flower market · Marble Palace · Jorasanko Thakur Bari · Kumortuli · Prinsep Ghat5 sights · Transport between sights Day 3Up the Hooghly: two temples, a mission and a tree the size of a forestDakshineswar Kali Temple · Belur Math · Indian Botanic Garden and the Great Banyan · Kalighat Kali Temple4 sights · Transport between sights

At a glance

Ways to use these days

If it rains: 5 of the stops are indoors — St. Paul's Cathedral · Indian Museum · Dakshineswar Kali Temple
Outdoors: South Park Street Cemetery · Howrah Bridge and the flower market · Indian Botanic Garden and the Great Banyan
Lightest day on foot: Day 1 — 6.3 km between stops
Most walking: Day 3 — 20.5 km

Morning

1Monument

Victoria Memorial

Lord Curzon proposed it the week Victoria died in 1901 and the money came from public subscription across India; William Emerson designed it, the marble came from Makrana in Rajasthan — the same quarry as the Taj Mahal — and it opened in 1921, by which time the capital had already moved to Delhi and the empire it commemorated had begun to come apart. The bronze Angel of Victory on the dome turns in the wind. Inside is a serious museum of Calcutta and the Raj: Company paintings, the Daniell aquatints, Tipu Sultan's possessions, and a gallery on the city's own history that does not flatter anyone.

Plan about 2 h 30 min
The galleries are open 10:00 to 18:00 and close on Mondays and designated national holidays; the gardens open at 06:00 and are a separate, cheaper ticket that Calcutta uses as a park

400 m east, about five minutes on foot

2Cathedral

St. Paul's Cathedral

Built between 1839 and 1847 and the first Anglican cathedral raised anywhere in the British empire outside the British Isles, in a thin Gothic that the builders called Indo-Gothic and everyone else has called eccentric ever since. Earthquakes in 1897 and 1934 took down the original spire twice, and the tower you see now is modelled on Bell Harry at Canterbury. The west window is by Edward Burne-Jones, the Florentine fresco work and the Dante panels are worth the walk up the nave, and the whole thing sits in a green compound three minutes from the Victoria Memorial.

Plan about 45 min
Free, generally open through the day with services on Sunday morning; it is a two-minute walk from the Victoria Memorial's north gate and shares the same stop on the Maidan

Midday

LunchPark Street is the old restaurant row and some of it has been going since the 1950s: Peter Cat for the chelo kebab, Mocambo, Trincas. The better-value Calcutta lunch is a Bengali thali — rice, shukto, a fish curry in mustard, chutney and a sweet — at one of the small Bengali restaurants in Bhowanipore or around Park Street. Street food here is its own subject: kathi rolls, phuchka, and the telebhaja stalls that fry through the afternoon.

Afternoon

1.6 km north up Chowringhee, about twenty minutes on foot or five by taxi

3Museum

Indian Museum

Founded by the Asiatic Society in 1814 and the oldest museum in India, in a colonnaded quadrangle on Chowringhee that is itself worth the ticket. The collection is enormous and uneven, which is part of the pleasure: the railing and gateway of the Bharhut stupa, second century BC and among the earliest Buddhist narrative sculpture anywhere; a Gandhara gallery; an Egyptian mummy that generations of Calcutta schoolchildren have been frightened by; meteorites, fossils, textiles and a zoology hall that has not been rearranged in a long time. Locals call it the Jadu Ghar, the house of magic.

Plan about 2 h 30 min
Open Tuesday to Sunday from 10:00 to 18:00 and closed on all Mondays; photography is charged separately at 50 rupees for a smartphone and 100 for a DSLR, and the cafeteria behind the main building opens 12:00 to 15:00

1.2 km south-east, about fifteen minutes on foot down Park Street

4Cemetery

South Park Street Cemetery

Opened in 1767 and one of the earliest large non-church cemeteries in the world, predating Père Lachaise by half a century. What the British built here were not headstones but monuments: pyramids, obelisks, domed cenotaphs and miniature Palladian temples crowded along overgrown paths under old trees. The inscriptions are the point. Read a dozen of them and the arithmetic of British Bengal becomes plain — most of the dead are in their twenties and thirties, carried off by cholera, malaria or the climate within a few years of arriving. Sir William Jones, the founder of comparative philology, is here.

Plan about 1 h
A small admission with an extra camera fee, generally open daily in daylight hours; it is a ten-minute walk south from Park Street and the paths are uneven, so wear proper shoes

Evening

2.5 km north-west across the Maidan, about ten minutes by taxi

5Stadium

Eden Gardens and the Maidan

A cricket ground since 1864 at the northern edge of the Maidan, and the loudest one in the world when it is full — around sixty-eight thousand people, in a city that treats the game as a civic religion. It has held a World Cup final, Tendulkar's farewell in Bengal and the 2001 Test against Australia that VVS Laxman turned around over two days. Around it lies the Maidan itself: a square kilometre of open ground that the army cleared in the 1750s so that Fort William's guns would have a field of fire, and which is now where Calcutta plays football, grazes goats and walks at dusk.

Plan about 1 h 15 min
The stadium can usually be seen from outside and tours run on non-match days; match tickets sell out immediately and are worth the effort. The Maidan is free and always open, and the walk across it at sunset is the point

Morning

1Bridge

Howrah Bridge and the flower market

A cantilever bridge of 1943, 705 metres long, built without a single nut or bolt in the main structure — it is riveted throughout, 26,500 tonnes of steel, and it carries a reported hundred thousand vehicles and several times that many people on foot every day. It has no pillars in the water, which is why it survives a river that moves. Underneath it on the Kolkata bank is the Mullick Ghat flower market, running before dawn: several thousand traders sitting in the mud with marigolds, tuberose and lotus, garlands being strung at speed, and porters carrying loads up the steps that should not be liftable.

Plan about 1 h 30 min
Free; the bridge may be walked but photography of it is officially prohibited from the bridge itself, so shoot from the ghats. The flower market is at its best between 05:00 and 08:00 and is very crowded and very wet underfoot

3 km north-east into Chorbagan, about fifteen minutes by taxi

2Historic house

Marble Palace

Raja Rajendra Mullick built this in 1835 in a north Calcutta lane and filled it the way a very rich nineteenth-century collector filled things: 126 kinds of marble on the floors, Belgian chandeliers, Victorian statuary, and walls hung three deep with paintings including works attributed to Rubens, Reynolds and Murillo. In the garden is a private menagerie, older than Alipore and therefore the oldest zoo in India. The family still lives in part of the house, which is why you are shown round by a guide, why the rooms are dim and dusty, and why the effect is closer to a time capsule than a museum.

Plan about 1 h 15 min
Free but a permit is required in advance from the West Bengal Tourism office, generally 24 hours ahead; it is closed on Mondays and Thursdays, photography is not allowed inside, and the guides expect a tip

Midday

LunchNorth Kolkata eats differently from the south: older, cheaper, more Bengali. Around Jorasanko and Shobhabazar there are century-old sweet shops — Girish Chandra Dey, Nakur Nandy — where a plate of sandesh and a shingara is the standard mid-morning stop, and cabin-style restaurants doing kosha mangsho with luchi. If you want the famous version, the Indian Coffee House on College Street is fifteen minutes away and is more a room than a restaurant.

Afternoon

600 m north, about eight minutes on foot through the lanes

3Historic house

Jorasanko Thakur Bari

The Tagore family house in north Calcutta, where Rabindranath Tagore was born in 1861 and died in 1941, and where a single extended family produced the Bengal Renaissance more or less on its own: a religious reformer, a novelist, the first Indian in the Indian Civil Service, the painters of the Bengal School, and the man who wrote the national anthems of two countries and won the Nobel Prize in 1913. The house is now a museum inside Rabindra Bharati University, with the rooms he was born and died in preserved, his manuscripts and paintings, and galleries on the family's Japan and Hungary connections.

Plan about 1 h 15 min
Ticketed, open Tuesday to Sunday with a midday break in some seasons and closed on Mondays; photography inside is not permitted and bags go in a locker. Allow an hour, more if you read Bengali

1.8 km north along the river, about ten minutes by taxi

4Neighbourhood

Kumortuli

A few narrow lanes on the river bank in north Calcutta where several hundred families do nothing but make gods. Clay is brought up from the Hooghly, packed onto straw and bamboo frames, dried, painted and dressed, and by October the idols of Durga killing the buffalo demon leave here for pandals across the city and increasingly across the world. Work goes on all year but the pace from August is extraordinary: workshops open to the lane, half-finished ten-armed goddesses standing in rows, the smell of wet clay and drying paint, and men carrying finished heads through the traffic on their shoulders.

Plan about 1 h 15 min
Free to walk; it is a working district, not an attraction, so ask before photographing people and keep out of the way. August to early October is when it is at full pitch; after Durga Puja it goes quiet

Evening

6 km south down the river bank, about twenty-five minutes by taxi, or the circular railway

5Monument

Prinsep Ghat

A Palladian pavilion of 1841 on the Hooghly bank, built for James Prinsep — the Assay Master of the Calcutta mint who in his spare time deciphered the Brahmi and Kharosthi scripts and so made it possible to read the Ashokan edicts, and who died at forty. The ghat and the promenade around it were restored in the 2000s and the result is the pleasantest stretch of riverside in the city: the Vidyasagar Setu's cables overhead, boats for hire, families out at dusk, and a view across the water that turns orange about half an hour before sunset.

Plan about 1 h
Free and always open; the circular railway stops at Prinsep Ghat station, boat rides are negotiated at the steps, and this is the place to be at sunset rather than at midday

Morning

1Temple

Dakshineswar Kali Temple

Rani Rashmoni, a widow from a low caste who had become one of the richest people in Bengal, built this in 1855 after a dream, and had to fight the priesthood to get it consecrated at all. The main temple is a navaratna, nine spires on a raised terrace, with twelve identical Shiva shrines along the river ghat below. What made it famous is the man she hired: Ramakrishna Paramahamsa served as priest here for thirty years, and his room at the north-west corner is kept as it was. On a festival day the queue for the sanctum is enormous and the whole complex is a slow, loud river of people.

Plan about 1 h 30 min
Free, generally open early morning to midday and again from mid-afternoon until about 20:30; shoes and bags are left at counters outside, phones and cameras are not allowed inside the temple compound, and mornings before 09:00 are the calm hours

3 km west across the river, about ten minutes by the ferry that runs between the two

2Temple

Belur Math

The headquarters of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission on the west bank of the Hooghly, on forty acres of quiet lawn that feels nothing like the city across the water. The main temple of 1938 was designed to Vivekananda's own brief: a Hindu temple plan with a Rajput and Mughal entrance, a Christian cruciform nave, Buddhist details and a dome derived from the Taj, on the argument that the religions are versions of one thing. Whatever you make of the theology, it is a genuinely beautiful building and the grounds along the river are the most peaceful place within reach of central Kolkata.

Plan about 1 h 30 min
Free, with the temple open in the morning and again from late afternoon into the evening and the grounds open longer; photography inside the temple is not allowed, and the ferry across from Dakshineswar is the good way to arrive

Midday

LunchBoth Dakshineswar and Belur Math have simple canteens and both serve the kind of vegetarian food that goes with the place. The better meal is on the way back: the Howrah side has fish thali places along the GT Road, and if you are heading to Kalighat, Bhowanipore has the South Indian tiffin houses and the Bengali sweet shops that make the neighbourhood worth an hour on its own.

Afternoon

10 km south on the Howrah bank, about thirty minutes by car

3Botanical garden

Indian Botanic Garden and the Great Banyan

Founded in 1787 on the Howrah bank, and one of the places where the botany of empire was actually done — Assam tea was developed here into a crop, and cinchona and rubber passed through on their way to being plantations. It covers about 109 hectares. The reason to come is the Great Banyan: a single tree more than 250 years old whose main trunk rotted away in the 1920s and which now survives entirely as a ring of more than 3,700 aerial roots, with a canopy circumference of about 486 metres. It looks like a forest and it is one organism, and it holds the record for the widest tree canopy in the world.

Plan about 2 h
A small entry fee, generally open sunrise to sunset; it is 8 km from the centre on the Howrah side and the Vidyasagar Setu is the quick way over. Weekday mornings are empty, Sundays are a city picnic

Evening

9 km east across the Vidyasagar Setu, about thirty minutes by car, or Kalighat metro station

4Temple

Kalighat Kali Temple

One of the fifty-one Shakti Peethas, where a toe of Sati's right foot is said to have fallen, and the shrine the city is named after — Kalighat became Calcutta in British mouths. The present temple dates from 1809 but the site is far older; the black stone image has three enormous gold-rimmed eyes and a gold tongue, and it is nothing like the polite Kali of museum bronzes. The lanes around it sell hibiscus garlands, vermilion and images; goats are still sacrificed in a side yard on certain days. It is an intense place and unapologetically a working one.

Plan about 1 h
Free, open from early morning until about 22:00 with a midday break; do not accept guidance from touts at the gate, who charge heavily for a queue jump you do not need, and the Kalighat metro station is a five-minute walk

Before you go

Good to know in Kolkata

Kolkata: hours and closed days

The Victoria Memorial states opening hours of 10:00 to 18:00, with the museum galleries closed on Mondays and on designated national holidays. The gardens keep separate and longer hours, 06:00 to 18:00, and are ticketed separately.Source: Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata · checked Sep 2026
The Indian Museum is open Tuesday to Sunday from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM and states that all Mondays are closed. Its cafeteria, behind the main museum building, is open to visitors from 12:00 noon to 3 PM, and the library is open 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM on weekdays except Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays.Source: Indian Museum Kolkata — Visitors Information · checked Sep 2026
The Indian Museum's published camera charges are 50 rupees for photography with a smartphone camera, 100 rupees with a DSLR, 2,000 rupees for a small video camera and 5,000 rupees for a camera with a stand. Tickets may be bought at the museum's own counter or online.Source: Indian Museum Kolkata — Visitors Information · checked Sep 2026

Questions

3 days in Kolkata: quick answers

Is 3 days enough for Kolkata?

Three days covers the Maidan monuments, the old north and the river, which is the shape of the city. What it cannot fit is the eating, and in Kolkata that is not a joke — the sweet shops, the Park Street institutions, the kathi roll stalls and the Bengali thali houses are as much the place as the buildings. It also cannot fit Durga Puja, which for five days in autumn turns the entire city into an open-air exhibition of temporary architecture and is one of the great festivals on earth.

What is the best time of year to visit Kolkata?

November to February, when it is dry and sits between 15°C and 27°C and the city is at its most liveable. October is Durga Puja — extraordinary, and also the hardest time to find a room or move around. March to June is hot and increasingly humid, and the monsoon from June to September brings serious rain and waterlogged streets. The Kolkata Book Fair in late January and the December jazz and film festivals all fall in the good months.

How do you get around Kolkata?

The metro is the fastest thing in the city and the Blue Line now runs from Dakshineswar in the north to Kavi Subhash in the south, with the newer lines crossing under the river to Howrah. Beyond that Kolkata has transport nothing else has: the last hand-pulled rickshaws in the world, a working tram network that began in 1902, and ferries across the Hooghly that are quicker than the bridges. Yellow Ambassador taxis are metered in theory; the ride-hailing apps avoid the argument.

How much does Kolkata cost per day?

It is among the cheapest large cities in India. A hostel bed runs 400 to 900 rupees, a decent mid-range hotel 2,500 to 5,000, and the Park Street hotels more. A Bengali thali is 200 to 400 rupees, a kathi roll under 100, and a full dinner at a Park Street institution 1,500 for two. Museum entry is small, with the Victoria Memorial and the Indian Museum both charging a foreign-visitor rate several times the Indian one, and cameras costing extra almost everywhere.

Do you need a permit for the Marble Palace?

Yes, and it catches people out. Entry is free but requires a permit obtained in advance from the West Bengal Tourism office, generally 24 hours ahead; without it you may be turned away at the gate, though in practice a tip sometimes settles it. The house is closed on Mondays and Thursdays, photography inside is not allowed, and you are taken round by a guide who will expect something at the end. It is worth the paperwork — there is nothing else quite like it in India.

Is Durga Puja worth planning a trip around?

If you can get a room, yes. For five days in late September or October the city builds several thousand pandals — temporary pavilions, some of them serious pieces of architecture and installation art — installs the Kumortuli idols in them, and stays awake. It is free, it is everywhere, and the whole city walks from pandal to pandal through the night. The costs are real: hotels double or triple, trains and flights book out months ahead, and moving across the city takes hours.

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3 Days in Kolkata

The Victoria Memorial and the Indian Museum, then the flower market and Kumortuli, then Dakshineswar and the Great Banyan

Ways to use these days