Sabz Burj

Few Delhi monuments are as easy to spot and as hard to reach as the Sabz Burj, the 'Green Tower' stranded on a busy traffic roundabout where Mathura Road bends towards Nizamuddin.

• Rising in a single octagonal storey to roughly 22 metres, it is crowned by a tall drum and a double dome once again sheathed in the blue and green glazed tiles that give it its name — a sudden flash of Central Asian colour amid the honking commute a few hundred metres west of Humayun's Tomb.
• Built in the 1530s, the tomb is one of the earliest surviving Mughal structures in the city, older than the great garden-tomb of Humayun that anchors the skyline just east.
• Who lies beneath it is genuinely unknown; the architectural historian Ebba Koch has suggested that Emperor Humayun may have raised it for his mother, Maham Begum, though the attribution remains a scholarly hypothesis rather than settled fact.
• In the early twentieth century the tower served, improbably, as a police station, and layers of cement smeared over that period smothered its painted interior for decades.
• Between 2018 and 2021 the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and the Archaeological Survey of India, backed by corporate funding, stripped away that damage.
• Craftsmen re-laid tens of thousands of hand-cut tiles across the drum and dome and uncovered one of the earliest painted ceilings of any Mughal building — a canopy of gold and deep lapis-blue medallions hidden for nearly a century.
• Its Timurid double dome, an idea carried south from Samarkand, is among the oldest of its kind in India.
• For a vegetarian traveller the Sabz Burj is a five-minute cameo rather than a meal-planning problem, but its position is handy: it sits between Pandara Road and Defence Colony, two of central Delhi's most dependable pure-vegetarian pockets.
• Pandara Road's Veg Gulati turns out ghee-rich North Indian thalis, dal makhani and paneer, while a short hop south brings the crisp dosas and sambar of a Sagar Ratna outlet — both entirely meat-free and egg-free, an easy way to fold the monument into a satisfying lunch loop.
• Because it stands on a live traffic island there is no ticket counter and no formal way inside; the tower is best appreciated from the surrounding pavement or, safest of all, as you circle it by car or auto on the way to Humayun's Tomb.
• Pair it with that UNESCO-listed complex just to the east for a proper morning of early-Mughal architecture.
• Come between October and March for clear light, and note that Delhi's winter air turns genuinely hazardous from November to January — an N95 mask is sensible on the worst days.