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Looking for help choosing or for a property we don't list? Message our Private Rates Concierge on WhatsApp for member rates and insider knowledge on the right stay
Jodhpur's monumental Art Deco palace, built as 1930s famine relief and still part royal residence, now a grand palace hotel above the Blue City.
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Award Winner 2015
Asia’s Best Classic
Free extra on us
Book 2 nights and get a 3rd free during off-season; value additions like a city-tour or a free dinner otherwise.
Need To Know
- 71 rooms and suites in a monumental Art Deco palace
- In Jodhpur, around 10 minutes from the airport
- Built 1929 to 1943 as famine relief for the city
- Still part-occupied by the Jodhpur royal family
- A subterranean zodiac pool, an outdoor pool and a spa
- Several restaurants, a historic bar and 26 acres of gardens
- Butler service; views to Mehrangarh Fort
Check in - Check out
Check in from 14:00; check out before 12:00.
We Love
- The palace — a monumental Art Deco pile of golden sandstone, designed by Henry Lanchester and finished in 1943, rising above Jodhpur on 26 acres of gardens.
- The history — built through the 1930s as famine relief to employ thousands, and still part-occupied by the Jodhpur royal family in their own wing.
- The pool — a subterranean zodiac pool built for the Maharaja, tiled and lamp-lit beneath the central dome, with a spa alongside.
- The bar — a wood-panelled bar and library once kept cool by ice poured into hollows in the walls, hung with the maharajas' hunting trophies.
- The views — out over the Blue City to the great Mehrangarh Fort on its ridge, best taken in over dinner at the palace's highest point.
Key Features
Book Your Stay at Umaid Bhawan Palace
€0.00 for 1 Night
Location
Address
Circuit House Road, Cantt Area, Jodhpur, Rajasthan 342006
Travel Info
Umaid Bhawan Palace stands on Circuit House Road in the Cantt area of Jodhpur, around a 10-minute drive from Jodhpur airport, with the old Blue City and Mehrangarh Fort a short drive away. The palace arranges transfers on request.
Nearby Places
Only a 10 minute drive from the Jodhpur Airport. The palace provides hotel pick-ups and drops on request.
5km
Last Updated: 2026-06-19
Expert Review
Origins
Umaid Bhawan Palace was born of a crisis. In the late 1920s, with Marwar gripped by drought and famine, the Maharaja of Jodhpur, Umaid Singh, commissioned an enormous new palace — partly as a residence, but above all as a public works scheme to put thousands of his people to work through the lean years. Construction ran from 1929 to 1943, and the building that rose is one of the last and largest of the great Indian palaces, a monumental fusion of Art Deco and Rajput design in golden Jodhpur sandstone, laid without mortar in interlocking blocks.
Designed by the British architect Henry Vaughan Lanchester, it is a palace on an imperial scale: a central dome over a hundred feet high, baroque sandstone and marble interiors, carved halls hung with the family's hunting trophies, 26 acres of gardens above the city. Part of it remains the home of the Jodhpur royal family to this day, who occupy their own wing; another part is a museum; and the rest is the hotel, with 71 rooms and suites, run in palatial style with butlers and ceremony.
It is, frankly, the grand option in Jodhpur — all dome and gardens and sweeping marble, a counterpoint to the intimate desert forts and family houses of the region. The set pieces are real: a subterranean zodiac pool built for the Maharaja beneath the dome; a wood-panelled bar and library once cooled by ice poured into the walls; high terraces looking across the Blue City to the Mehrangarh Fort. It is more monument than boutique, and stays here are about living, however briefly, inside one of the world's great private palaces.
Top Secret
Ask about dinner at the top. The palace can set up a private table at its highest point — the loftiest spot in all of Jodhpur — with the Blue City and the lights of Mehrangarh Fort spread out below and local musicians playing. It takes a little notice, but in a building full of grand gestures it is the one most worth arranging, and the staff are well practised at making an occasion of it.
The Review
Umaid Bhawan Palace is one of India's great palace hotels, and a stay here is less about a room than about the building itself. Finished in 1943 as the last of the country's monumental palaces — and built, remarkably, as famine relief to employ the city through hard years — it is a vast Art Deco pile of golden sandstone, still part-home to the Jodhpur royal family, set in 26 acres above the Blue City.
The grandeur is the point. A hundred-foot dome, sweeping marble halls, hunting trophies, 26 acres of gardens, and a subterranean zodiac pool built for the Maharaja are the kind of set pieces few hotels anywhere can match; the welcome is full of ceremony, the service palatial, and the views run across the city to the Mehrangarh Fort. With 71 rooms and suites it is large by the standards of this club, and unmistakably a grand hotel rather than an intimate one — the trade-off for staying inside a working palace.
It makes the clearest possible contrast with the small desert forts and family houses elsewhere in Marwar: where they offer intimacy, Umaid Bhawan offers scale and spectacle. For a night or two of full-blown palace theatre — dome, gardens, ceremony and all — on a trip through Rajasthan, it is about as grand as India gets, and a fitting counterpart to the quieter stays nearby.
