intach heritage centre

One of the best things we did was to take the Heritage Walk. Do not miss this!If you reach on a Friday or Saturday, the best way to start your Pondi experience is to walk. Go straight to Le Café on the beach road (The Promenade, as they call it) in the evening; that is walk South till you see Bay of Bengal, look for the only building on the beach. That is Le Café. Plan to reach a little early so that you can also enjoy a cup of coffee looking on the sea. Do visit the Tourism department office on the opposite side. Collect a free brochure. That would be very handy in deciding your days, eating, shopping and stay in Pondicherry. Very informative! Now about the walk.INTACH organizes a Heritage Walk from Le café at 4.00 PM. INTACH (Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage) is an all India organisation, with headquarters in New Delhi, dedicated to heritage conservation and awareness. INTACH works with restoring the old French and Tamil houses and buildings.

We HIGHLY reocmmend the Intach tour. Ashok, the architect who works for Intach and gave us the tour, was kind, interesting, and challenged our way of viewing and thinking about urban planning in India. The tour was fascinating and well worth it! If you are interested in design, architecture, urban planning and history, you will LOVE this tour. the proceeds contribute to the organization's objective, which is to restore, protect and redesign colonial and heritage buildings in Pondichery. they do an amazing job and they have helped make the city unique and beautiful. Please do go on this tour and encourage Intach to pursue their important work!!!

I went to the INTACH Centre hoping to join the walking tour but there wasn't any at the time.But I requested for a pamphlet and that was sufficient to take me to most places around Pondicherry. But for a DIY tour, a lot of pre-reading / google-ing is needed to truly know what you are looking at. Otherwise, after the 4th location, everything just about looks the same.

The INTACH, Pondicherry's built-heritage preservation agency, is housed in a carefully restored Tamil courtyard house in the area west of the north-south canal. While many of the larger historic official buildings and private homes in the European area, i.e. that closest to the sea front, have survived, historic homes in the Tamil urban vernacular style survive only patchily as property in the Tamil part of town is the object of extensive demolition/rebuild - and the new buildings, on Rue J. Nehru for example, is on the whole pretty ugly. In this context, the INTACH Pondicherry has managed to become the advocate of sensitive reconstruction. Façades are kept, even if most of what lies behind is totally rebuilt. The Government of India is interested in developing Pondicherry as a tourist destination and saving the surviving buildings of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth century buildings is part of that strategy. The private sector is managing to develop heritage hotels, with the Neemrana Group, amongst others, involved. It will be interesting to see what happens to the sea-front Hôtel de Ville (City Hall), which recently collapsed. Hopefully the INTACh will be able to advocate a sensitive reconstruction of this fine building.

After reading the rave reviews of the heritage walk conducted by Mr. Ashok Panda of INTACH, it was part of my 'must do' items in my short trip to Pondicherry last week. On contacting Mr. Panda we were told that though there was no walk planned, he would do one for the two of us on Saturday, which we thought was very nice of him. However, the walk itself turned out to be quite disappointing. Mr. Panda walked us around a couple of lanes in the French quarters and pointed out some of the better preserved private residences, hotels and buildings restored by INTACH ( I must say, INTACH is doing a great job in preserving the heritage of this beautiful city).At the end of the hour long walk, on Mr. Panda's request we paid him Rs. 500 which he mentioned would be our contribution to INTACH. It was only then that he casually handed over a pamphlet containing the details of the heritage walk. On perusing the same, we realised that out of the 21 sites listed to be covered under the heritage walk of the French quarters, we had only covered about 3 or 4 sites, with most of the important landmarks like the Aurobindo Ashram, Raj Bhawan and other important colonial buildings having been left out, without which no walk of the French Quarters could be treated as complete !! It was such a let down for heritage enthusiasts like us who were so looking forward to this walk to experience and understand the colonial past of this beautiful city. I would advice others planning to take this walk, to ensure that they are well informed of the details of the walk before embarking on the same, so that they do not feel disappointed like us. Unfortunately, we had to miss most of these important sites as we had a very short visit to pondicherry and had looked forward to covering these sites during the heritage walk.

We visited the Pndicherry in December and it was every penny spent the main functionary took us around the place to see the heritage of the entire place every minute spent there was worth the money we paid. The efforts made by them is commendable wish all the people have same concern for the country.

Let me not say only about this church....all the church in pondicherry are well built, standing tall... inspiring you to rise...i love the architecture and design....

It received award in 2008 from UNESCO -Asia -Pacific Heritage Award. Beautiful objective to protect all Heritage Building, Construction sites to preserve and save them. Many important and valuable photos and documents are there. Heritage tour is very interesting.

If u want to know the A to Z about Pondicherry since its existence than this place is the MECCA for that. At the same time all the other places are nearby from here

Not found on most Pondy travel guides, this place is a history buffs paradise. Look at INTACH's efforts towards preservation and goals. Relive some of the past memories. Shuts early in the evening though.

We took the Heritage Tour of Pondicherry, with Mr Ashok Panda, and found it very interesting. His knowledge of Pondicherry is immense and he truely cares for the place.I would recommend it to anyone who likes to know about the history the place they visit.We unfortunately could not visit the INTACH centre itself.

A very interesting place that has been well restored and maintained and gives a great glimpse into the architectural and cultural history of Pondicherry.

Intach Heritage building is a must visit in Pondicherry for 2 good reasons:1. It has the most unique architecture. The ground floor is designed in a South Indian Tamil style of architecture and the upper floor is designed like a French colonial building.2. It is situated in one of the most beautiful streets of Pondicherry.

Mr. Ashok Panda's walking tour of the French Quarter in Pondy was one of the best things I did when I visited the city - he is knowledgeable, friendly, passionate and a great person to show you Pondy through his (and INTACH's) eyes. The restoration work INTACH is doing is incredible and would be lost to the casual observer, but for this informative and fun walk.

Thanks to Mr Panda, we got to understand the work being done by INTACH to educate, teaching by example, and to guide locals living, building and restoring in the area. We were walked around part of the Tamil area and shown the key differences between these charming homes and the no-less pretty French colonial houses, a few of which are now hotels. A wonderful area and it was obvious that our guide loved the city and was so proud of the achievements being made to preserve it.