Feisty Lahore – a city like no other!

For a taste of authentic and rich Punjabi culture, there is quite no place like Lahore. The capital of Pakistani Punjab and the second biggest city in the country after Karachi, Lahore is unique for its heritage.

Influences of Mughal architecture and culture were rooted in Lahore centuries before India’s partition gave the city to Pakistan. In fact, one of its popular epithets is “Garden of Mughals”. The eye can never feel sated with the bountifulness of this city.

The essence of Punjabi spirit is located in the Walled City, the heartland of Lahore. All that the Walled City occupies is a total area of just one square kilometer, but the best that the city’s heritage has to offer is concentrated here. Pick your choice from the world-famous Lahore Fort, which is a UNESCO-protected World Heritage Site, Shalimar Gardens, the Badshahi Mosque, the Royal Fort, the mausoleums of Jahangir and his wife Noor Jahan, Lahore Cantonment and the Inner City, all of which sit among many Gurudwaras. Although Lahore is situated just 20 miles from Amritsar in Indian Punjab, these structures give it a unique identity.

It is not for nothing that the Shahis, Ghaznavids, Ghurids, Mughals, Sikhs and the British found it so alluring that they made it their base.

Lahore is one city in which there is absolutely no conflict between the past and the present. If all the city’s major monuments were built decades and centuries ago, it is today a city whose modern monuments give it a place among the world’s most energetic cities. The Lahore Art Gallery, Free Manson Hall, Lahore Museum, Lawrence Gardens and Library, Minar-e-Pakistan, Lahore Fortress and Shahzid Manzil are some of the innumerable attractions of this eight million-strong city, the world’s 26th largest.

And then, there is Lahore High Court, which has the distinction of being the oldest seat of justice in the country. It has been hearing legal cases since 1866, when the British established their jurisprudence over then India. The foundation for this legal entity though, was laid by the illustrious Ranjit Singh.