Every other destination in our Rajasthan collection is defined, in one way or another, by the desert — its light, its architecture, its heat. Mount Abu is the deliberate exception. Rising to over 1,200 metres in the Aravalli range, it is Rajasthan’s only hill station, a retreat the region’s rulers and, later, British colonial administrators sought out specifically because it offered something the rest of the state could not: genuinely cool air, forest cover, and a landscape of granite hills and lakes rather than sand.

The hill’s spiritual significance long predates its life as a retreat. Mount Abu is one of Jainism’s most sacred sites, home to the Delwara Temples — a cluster of five marble temples built between the 11th and 13th centuries, whose ceiling and pillar carving is frequently described as the finest marble work anywhere in India. The intricacy is such that certain motifs were carved not by chisel alone but by rubbing the marble with increasingly fine abrasives until translucent, a technique that makes photography inside the temples forbidden precisely because no image could do the actual stone justice.

Nakki Lake, the town’s other defining feature, sits at the centre of Mount Abu and is, according to local legend, a lake dug out by the nails (*nakh*) of gods rather than human hands. Around it, the hill station’s character settled into something genuinely distinct from the rest of Rajasthan — colonial-era guesthouses, walking trails, and a slower, cooler pace of life that has made Mount Abu a popular retreat for Gujarati and Rajasthani families alike for well over a century.