Things to Do in Mumbai, area by area

A UNESCO-listed island of basalt temples carved straight into a hillside, where a six-metre Shiva stares back at you across fourteen centuries — and the only way in is a ferry, which makes it the lowest-carbon big day out in the city.

One hundred and nine Buddhist excavations cut into a forested basalt ridge inside the national park — a thousand years of monastic building, twenty kilometres from the office towers of Andheri.

Nineteen Buddhist excavations from the first century BCE stranded in the middle of Mumbai's busiest business suburb — free to enter, ten minutes from a metro station, and almost nobody goes.

One of the earliest major Hindu cave temples in India — a sixth-century pillared hall over sixty metres long, now hemmed in by a living neighbourhood and still used for worship.

An eighth-century Shaiva rock-cut shrine with a Portuguese church built directly on top of it — the clearest single image of Mumbai's layered religious history, and free to walk into.

A second-century BCE Buddhist monastery on a Sahyadri hillside, with a wooden-form chaitya vault, fourteen stupas in a rock cleft and a waterfall running past the steps in monsoon.

The largest and best-preserved early Buddhist prayer hall in India — a forty-five-metre chaitya of carved pillars, elephant capitals and a two-thousand-year-old stupa, reached by a stairway shared with a busy hilltop temple.

Mumbai's great museum: seventy thousand objects from Indus Valley seals to Gandhara Buddhas and Mughal miniatures, inside George Wittet's domed Indo-Saracenic landmark in the middle of the Kala Ghoda art district.

The city's oldest museum, restored to its 1872 Victorian glory — gilded columns, Minton floors and the decorative-arts collection that tells how Bombay was made.

The quiet Gamdevi house where Gandhi stayed for seventeen years, kept as he left it — his room, his spinning wheel, a library of fifty thousand books, and no entrance fee.

Two small hilltop gardens on Malabar Hill — clipped animal topiary on one side of the road, the classic Queen's Necklace view over Chowpatty on the other, both free and both a ten-minute climb above the noise.

Twenty-eight acres of open maidan in the middle of Dadar — the nursery of Indian cricket, the city's biggest morning walking track, and the clearest window into how Mumbai actually uses public space.

A 37-acre forest grown on top of a closed rubbish dump beside the Mithi River — the single most persuasive thing in Mumbai to show anyone who thinks urban land is beyond repair.

A 3.6 km sea wall walk from Nariman Point to Girgaum Chowpatty that gives Mumbai its most recognisable curve — free, flat, open all night, and the one place a business traveller can clear their head between meetings.

Mumbai's big, loud, six-kilometre suburban beach — chaat stalls, horse carts, sunset crowds and the closest thing to open sand within reach of the airport hotels.

A 1.2 km paved walkway along a rocky Bandra shoreline, running from a Portuguese fort to a fishing village, with the Sea Link on the horizon and half the suburb walking it at dusk.