Bathinda Fort (Qila Mubarak)

Bathinda Fort, also known locally as Qila Mubarak — a name it shares coincidentally with the unrelated royal fort in Patiala — is one of India's oldest surviving forts, its massive mud-brick walls dating back over a thousand years and historically significant as the place where Razia Sultan, medieval India's only female Sultan, was imprisoned. The fort's scale and antiquity distinguish it from the more decoratively ornate Patiala structure of the same name, this Bathinda fort being valued primarily for its sheer historical age and defensive scale.

The fort's continued structural survival across a millennium of Punjab's often turbulent history — surviving Mongol raids, changes of ruling dynasty and Punjab's later colonial and post-independence periods — makes it a genuinely significant heritage site, if less visually decorative than some of Punjab's later princely-era palaces.

Believed to date back to around the 3rd century CE with major reconstruction under later rulers, Bathinda Fort is historically significant as the site of Razia Sultan's imprisonment in 1240 following a rebellion against her rule, one of the most dramatic episodes in the Delhi Sultanate's early history.

In Bathinda city, easily reached by road.