The big sights, worth the trip

A 705-metre cantilever with no bolts holding it together, carrying more foot traffic than almost any bridge on earth.

Cantilever steel truss

An imperial mausoleum for a queen who never came, now the city's most-photographed lawn and a museum of the empire that built it.

Indo-Saracenic, Makrana marble

A private mansion of 126 kinds of marble, still lived in by the family, still lit mostly by daylight.

Neoclassical with a Bengali courtyard plan

The ninth-oldest museum in the world and the oldest in Asia, holding the Bharhut stupa railing and an Egyptian mummy that generations of Kolkata schoolchildren have been frightened by.

Italianate

A nine-spired temple on the river, built by a widow the priesthood tried to refuse, and the place where Ramakrishna spent thirty years.

Nabaratna, nine-spired Bengali temple

The first Anglican cathedral built outside Britain, with a tower rebuilt twice after earthquakes and a nave designed to move air.

Indo-Gothic

Built as a dormitory for junior clerks of the East India Company and used as the seat of Bengal's government for the next two centuries.

Greco-Roman with a Corinthian range

The city's principal mosque, red sandstone above a street that during Ramadan becomes the best place to eat in Kolkata.

Mughal revival, red Tantpur sandstone

The headquarters of the Ramakrishna Mission, built so that its silhouette reads as a temple, a mosque and a church depending on where you stand.

Deliberately syncretic: temple, mosque, church

Eight acres of enormous eighteenth-century tombs, most of them holding people who died in their twenties.

Neoclassical funerary: obelisks, pyramids, cenotaphs

The shrine the city is probably named after, older than the city, on a channel of the Adi Ganga.

Bengali ath-chala

The city's third-oldest church, built on a graveyard, with Job Charnock's mausoleum in the yard and the Last Supper painted with Calcutta merchants as the apostles.

Georgian, after St Martin-in-the-Fields

A colonnaded dome on the footprint of the original Fort William, with brass markers in the pavement showing where the Black Hole stood.

Corinthian, with a lead-covered dome

The oldest high court in India, in a red-brick Gothic pile copied from a medieval cloth hall in Flanders.

Gothic Revival, after the Cloth Hall at Ypres

Built by Wellesley on the plan of a Derbyshire country house, and the seat of the Governor-General until the capital moved to Delhi.

Neoclassical, after Kedleston Hall

Paid for by public lottery, and the room where Jagadish Chandra Bose sent a radio wave through three walls in 1895.

Roman Doric

Thirty Corinthian columns copied from Athens, built for a public library, and named for the Governor-General who abolished press censorship.

Greek Revival, after the Tower of the Winds

An octagonal star fort so expensive and so well designed that nobody ever attacked it, and the reason the Maidan exists.

Vauban-style octagonal star fort

The house where Rabindranath Tagore was born, wrote, painted and died, and where a family more or less invented modern Bengali culture.

Bengali courtyard mansion with Palladian additions

The oldest church in Kolkata, built by a community that was trading here before the East India Company arrived.

Armenian Apostolic, with a later spire

One of three surviving synagogues of a Baghdadi Jewish community that once numbered thousands and now numbers a few dozen, maintained by Muslim caretakers.

Neoclassical, with Baghdadi Jewish detail

Not a monument but a living one: three hundred years of potters in a few lanes, and the reason Durga Puja looks the way it does.

Working craft quarter