Bhadra Fort and Teen Darwaza

Bhadra Fort is the citadel around which Ahmedabad grew. Sultan Ahmed Shah I of the Gujarat Sultanate founded the city on the east bank of the Sabarmati River in 1411, and the fort, raised at the start of the new settlement, served as the royal seat, treasury and administrative core. The fortified enclosure once held palaces, a mosque, gardens and a large ceremonial open ground known as the Maidan Shahi, or Royal Square. Its main ceremonial entrance is the Teen Darwaza, a triple-arched gateway dated to about 1415, which opens onto the Royal Square and originally framed processions and durbars. The three carved arches are built of local sandstone and reflect the Indo-Islamic style of the early Sultanate, with fine stone jaali and bracket work. Inside the enclosure stands the Azam Khan Sarai, a caravanserai added in 1637 during the Mughal period under the governor Azam Khan, and the small Bhadra Kali temple, from which the fort is popularly said to take its name. Across the centuries the fort passed from the Sultans to the Mughals, then to the Marathas, and finally to the British, who used parts of the complex for administration and as a prison. Much of the original palace fabric is lost, and the surviving walls, gates and sarai show the wear of six centuries of urban use. Government offices still occupy portions of the compound. The precinct is best understood as an open-air walk rather than a curated museum: there is no fixed exhibition, and interpretation comes from signage and local guides. The area around Teen Darwaza was pedestrianised and redeveloped in the late 2010s as the Bhadra Plaza, improving access to the gateway and the nearby Sidi Saiyyed Mosque and Lal Darwaja market, though the fabric of the monuments themselves remains that of a heritage quarter under everyday pressure from traffic and trade. Visitors reaching Ahmedabad's Walled City for the first time often start here, since the fort, the Royal Square and the Teen Darwaza make a compact introduction to the city's founding and to its layered Sultanate, Mughal and colonial past.