North Konkan · Western Coastal Strip
Rock-cut Shaiva caves on an island an hour by launch from the Gateway, dominated by the six-metre three-headed Sadashiva. The whole hall is carved downward out of the hill, so every pillar is a leftover rather than a support, and a single misjudged cut could not be undone. Inscribed by UNESCO in 1987.
Best time: November–March; boats do not run in the monsoon. Getting there: Launch from the Gateway of India, roughly an hour each way.
More than a hundred Buddhist excavations cut into a basalt ridge over roughly a thousand years, with rock-cut cisterns, a chaitya hall and inscriptions recording donors from the trading towns of the coast. They sit inside a national park inside a city of twenty million, which is the single strangest sentence in this file.
Getting there: Inside Sanjay Gandhi National Park at Borivali; park bus from the gate.
The 1888 terminus of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, Victorian Gothic with Indian detail carved by students of the local art school, and still the busiest working station of its kind anywhere. Inscribed by UNESCO in 2004.
Two facing rows around the Oval Maidan — nineteenth-century Gothic public buildings on one side, 1930s Art Deco apartment blocks and cinemas on the other, built on reclaimed land within seventy years of each other. Inscribed by UNESCO in 2018. The city holds one of the largest concentrations of Art Deco buildings in the world.
Around a hundred square kilometres of forest with a resident leopard population inside the municipal boundary, plus the Tulsi and Vihar lakes that were the city's first piped water. The leopards are studied as one of the world's clearest cases of large-carnivore coexistence with high-density human settlement.
Best time: November–February.
The walled seat of the Portuguese Northern Province, with roofless churches, a Dominican convent and gates standing in tidal scrub. It fell to a Maratha siege under Chimaji Appa in 1739 after a campaign of years, and was never reoccupied at scale, which is why the ruin is legible rather than built over.
Shivaji's capital and coronation site of 1674, on a flat-topped ghat spur reached by some 1,400 steps or a ropeway. The market street, court platform and his samadhi survive on the plateau. Inscribed by UNESCO in 2025 as a component of the Maratha Military Landscapes of India.
Best time: October–February.
A low island fort off Thal, fortified by Shivaji in the face of an English blockade and later the base of the Maratha admiral Kanhoji Angre. Also inscribed in 2025 within the Maratha Military Landscapes serial property; access is limited because a working lighthouse occupies the island.
A sea fort on a rock in the bay, held by the Siddis of Janjira and never taken — Maratha, Portuguese, Dutch and British attempts all failed across some three centuries. Its walls rise straight from the water, and it keeps large freshwater tanks inside a saltwater fort, which is why a siege never worked.
Getting there: Sailboats from Rajapuri jetty, weather permitting.
A fort in the intertidal zone off Alibag beach, built up by Shivaji from 1662 and later Angre's naval base. You can walk to it at low tide and not at high tide, which is the entire point of where it was put.
A basalt thumb of rock above the Mumbai–Goa highway with a fort on top and a small sanctuary around it, known for wintering and passage birds and for being the closest real forest walk to the city.
Best time: November–March.
A laterite-capped hill station on the ghat crest where motor vehicles are not permitted at all — access is on foot, on horseback, or by the two-foot narrow-gauge line that has been climbing from Neral since 1907. The ban is the reason the place still sounds like a hill station.
Best time: October–May.
A busy suburban town on top of one of the oldest ports on the west coast, identified with the Shurparaka of early texts. A Buddhist stupa mound excavated here yielded relic caskets and a fragment of an Ashokan edict — evidence that this coast was trading and receiving imperial edicts long before any of its present cities existed.
A rectangular stepped tank of the twelfth century on Malabar Hill, fed by a spring, ringed by dharamshalas and small temples, and sitting a few hundred metres from some of the most expensive real estate in Asia. It is the oldest continuously used structure in the city.
Working fishing villages inside the city, with their own tenure, their own festivals and a fish auction that starts before dawn. Sassoon Dock, built in the 1870s, is where to see the trawler catch land and be sold in the same hour.
Best time: Any morning between five and eight.
A small upland town, seat of a former Koli princely state, with the 1930s Jai Vilas palace, waterfalls at Dabhosa and the Warli painting villages in the country around it.
Best time: July–February.
Kilometres of shallow evaporation pans along the creeks, worked from December to May, and simultaneously the metropolitan region's largest undeveloped flood buffer. Best seen from the train window between Bhayandar and Vasai Road at any time of year.
Two shrines whose congregations do not observe the boundaries anyone assumes. The Bandra basilica's September fair and the December urs of Makhdoom Ali Mahimi at Mahim both draw crowds of every faith, and at Mahim the city police have carried the ceremonial chadar for generations.
Places worth visiting in North Konkan — heritage sites, wildlife, pilgrimage and landscape, with the best time to go. (18)