Mehrangarh Fort

When Rao Jodha displaced a hermit to build Mehrangarh Fort in 1459, the angered holy man cursed the site with eternal drought. To break the curse, a man named Raja Ram Meghwal volunteered to be buried alive in the foundation. In return, Rao Jodha promised his descendants would be cared for in perpetuity, and to this day, Meghwal’s family still lives in Jodhpur’s Raj Bagh neighborhood, their upkeep maintained by the Rathore family, five and a half centuries later.

The fort they built rises 400 feet above the city on a cliff, its walls climbing another 36 meters of solid sandstone. Its seven gates still carry the dents of cannonballs fired by Jaipur’s armies, none of which got any further than the second one. Just inside Loha Pol, the Iron Gate, fifteen small handprints remain pressed into the stone, left by the widows of Maharaja Man Singh before they walked into his funeral pyre in 1843. Mehrangarh has never fallen to a siege. It has just quietly kept records of everyone who tried.