South Asia's greenest planned capital — where Faisal Mosque (South Asia's largest, built by Saudi Arabia as a gift to Pakistan) rises from a dramatic triangular concrete shell at the foot of the Margalla Hills, Daman-e-Koh viewpoint overlooks 350,000 planted trees in a capital designed from scratch in 1966, the Lok Virsa museum preserves Pakistan's 72 living languages and craft traditions, and Taxila (40 km west) preserves 3,000 years of continuous civilisation including the ancient world's most important centre of learning
Islamabad (1.1 million city; metro 2.2 million including Rawalpindi) is the capital of Pakistan and one of the world's newest planned capitals — conceived in 1960, designed by Greek urban planner Doxiadis Associates, and inaugurated in 1966 to replace Karachi as the administrative capital. The city's design (a grid of 'sectors' each with their own markets, parks, mosques, and residential clusters, all oriented to the Margalla Hills escarpment) gives Islamabad a spaciousness unique among South Asian capitals — wide tree-lined streets, maintained parks, and the Margalla Hills National Park (17,…
The Rawalpindi-Islamabad area sits at the crossroads of the Grand Trunk Road (Sher Shah Suri's 16th-century road from Bengal to Kabul, the spine of the Mughal Empire) and the routes through the Khyber Pass — a position that has made this area militarily and commercially vital for 3,000 years. Taxila (40 km west) was the capital of the Achaemenid Persian satrapy of Gandhara (5th century BCE), an important city in Alexander the Great's South Asian campaign (326 BCE), the centre of Buddhist learning and Gandharan art (3rd century BCE–5th century CE), and a Silk Road node — one of the most contin…