Peths & Wadas
Old City Heritage Walk
जुन्या पुण्याची सफर
The walk we come back to again and again. Through Kasba, Shaniwar and Budhwar Peth — past Pune's oldest temple, the walls of Shaniwar Wada, and wada doorways that have been opening onto the same lanes for two hundred years.
Pune's old city is not a monument you visit. It is a neighbourhood people still live in — where a 300-year-old wada has a scooter parked in its courtyard and a shop selling mobile covers under its teak balcony.
This walk moves slowly through Kasba Peth, the oldest of the city's seventeen peths, and out toward Shaniwar Wada. Along the way we read the buildings: the deep stone plinths, the cusped arches, the carved brackets holding up a first floor, the small shrine set into a compound wall. We look at how a wada was organised — who lived where, where the water came from, why the courtyard sits at the centre of everything.
And we talk about the people. The Peshwas who built here, the traders who followed them, the families whose sixth generation still lights the lamps at a neighbourhood temple.
What we see
The route changes a little each time, depending on what is open, what is being repaired, and what is happening on the street that morning — which is rather the point.
On this walk
- Kasba Ganpati — the gramadaivat, Pune's presiding deity
- The basalt walls and Delhi Gate of Shaniwar Wada
- Wada architecture: courtyards, brackets, balconies, water
- Lesser-known Peshwa-era temples tucked into the lanes
- The peth as a living neighbourhood, not a museum
From this walk
Keep walking
Other routes
Kasba Peth & Budhwar Peth
Kasba is the oldest peth in the city and Budhwar grew up beside it. Together they hold Pune's founding temple, its densest surviving wada fabric, and its most complicated present.
In & Around Shaniwar Peth
One of Pune's oldest neighbourhoods, founded under Murtaza Nizam Shah, and one of its least explored. Quiet lanes, magnificent wadas and temples the Peshwas built.
Timeless Tales of Laxmi Road
Pune had a shopping street sixty years before it had a mall. Laxmi Road is retail, ritual, architecture and civic history all running along the same kilometre.