Everyone comes for strawberries and cream. Twenty-four kilometers away is a cliff where history got a lot less sweet.
Everyone comes to Mahabaleshwar for strawberries and cream. Twenty-four kilometres away is a cliff where history got a lot less sweet.
The postcard version is the “Queen of Hill Stations” — colonial bungalows, boating on Venna Lake, and strawberries everywhere you look. Mahabaleshwar grows nearly 85% of India’s strawberries, GI-tagged since 2010, and that’s the whole story most visitors go home with.
What most people skip is Pratapgad Fort, just 24km away — built by Shivaji Maharaj, site of his 1656 battle with Afzal Khan. It’s an easy add-on that most itineraries quietly drop in favour of one more round of strawberries and cream. Standing at the edge of the valley below the fort, where traitors were once thrown to their deaths as punishment, no plaque prepares you for how that lands — the quiet, the drop, the weight of something that happened centuries ago.
Mahabaleshwar sells you cream and berries. Twenty-four kilometres away, it hands you something you don’t forget. Both are real. Only one of them makes it onto the postcard.
— Suparna