Things to do in Peshawar

Landmark · Walled city

The Storytellers' Bazaar, where caravan traders once traded news along with goods, and the lane of nineteenth-century merchant houses behind it.

Local tip: Come for the bazaar and stay for Sethi House, a restored 1880s merchant mansion a few streets in with Bukhara-influenced woodwork and a basement built to be cool in a Peshawar July. It is signposted badly and worth the asking around.

Culture · Grand Trunk Road, near the cantonment

One of the world's great Gandhara collections, in a 1907 hall built as a memorial to Queen Victoria.

Local tip: This is not a provincial museum with a few good pieces — it holds the largest single collection of Gandhara Buddhist sculpture anywhere, from a civilisation that had its centre exactly here. Go on a weekday morning and give it two hours rather than forty minutes.

Food · Central Peshawar

The salt market, and the tikka and karahi street that has grown through it — you pick your meat by weight at the front and it is cooked in front of you.

Local tip: Order by the kilo, not by the dish, and specify 'dumba' if you want the fat-tailed sheep the city is actually known for. Go after nine at night. Cash only, no menus, and the qahwa afterwards is not optional.

Neighborhood · West of the old city

The two planned areas where nearly every foreign resident, aid agency and consulate-adjacent office in Peshawar ends up.

Local tip: University Town is older, greener and closer in; Hayatabad is newer, gridded into numbered phases and where the Zu corridor terminates. Ask which one your employer's security assessment covers before you choose — that answer is often the whole decision.

Nature · South and east of the walled city

An 1802 Sikh-era walled garden and the much larger royal garden that gives the city its remaining shade.

Local tip: Wazir Bagh is the older and quieter of the two and almost nobody visits it — a walled Mughal-plan garden hemmed in by traffic on all sides. Early morning, before the heat and before the cricket.

Culture · Highest point of the walled city

A Mughal caravanserai turned Sikh temple turned colonial fire station, with an archaeological trench cut through the middle of it.

Local tip: The trench is the point. It exposes stratified occupation layers going back more than two thousand years on the same spot, which makes Peshawar one of the longest continuously inhabited cities in South Asia — and you can stand on the edge and look down through it. Almost no visitors get here.