Despite being one of the largest cities in the world, Greater Jakarta is home to over 30m people, behind only Tokyo in size, Jakarta is relatively little visited by tourists. Most go directly to Bali, Lombok or Yogyakarta. I spent a couple of days in Indonesia’s former capital exploring the main sights, covered in this post, and some of the less well known sights, covered in a separate post.

To start with Istiqlal Mosque, the largest mosque in Southeast Asia, and the ninth largest mosque in the world in terms of worshipper capacity. Construction started in 1961 and took 17 years to complete. It is easily visited on free tours run half hourly.

Literally across the road, and also connected by a tunnel, is Jakarta Cathedral or The Church of Our Lady of the Assumption. This Catholic cathedral was the second church on the site, after the first collapsed in 1890. The current cathedral dates from 1901 and was renovated between 1988 and 2002. I visited just after Sunday mass to find a lot more selfie taking going on than I expected…

Nearby the West Irian Liberation Monument commemorates Indonesia’s controversial control of West Papua, handed over under pressure from the Dutch in 1962.

Merdeka Square was the largest square in the world until two larger ones in Dalian and Daqing in China opened in 1997 and 2000 respectively. At 1,000,000m2 or 75 hectares, it is over five times the size of Tiananmen Square. This makes it epic, but also quite exhausting to walk around in the Jakarta heat. In the centre of the square lies Monas (The National Monument or Monumen Nasional in Indonesian). This 132m high obelisk was built to commemorate the struggle for Indonesian independence, and opened in 1975 after 14 years of construction. I tried to get tickets to go to the top, but they’re limited to 200 an hour, and at 12.30pm on a Sunday the next earliest ticket time was 5pm…

Next to the square is the National Museum, one of the largest in Southeast Asia. It wasn’t as interesting as I’d expected, despite the money that had clearly been spent on exhibition design and a new building. The crowds didn’t help. It had only reopened in October 2024, three months before I visited, after a fire in September 2023.

Jakarta is home to one of the largest, and certainly least touristy, Chinatowns in Southeast which was a highlight of my visit. The Gapura Chinatown Kawasan Pancoran Glodok gate marks the entrance.

The Dharma Bhakti Temple complex dates back to 1650 though the current buildings are 18th century, after the site was burnt to the ground during a massacre of over 10,000 Chinese in 1740. It is an atmospheric place to explore.

There were more gates and shrines in the neighbouring streets.

Petak Sembilan Market was one of the more intense and fascinating markets I’ve visited.

Santa Maria de Fatima is a Catholic church built with Chinese architecture in the early 19th century, but a large awning at the front of the church made this hard to see. It had a colourful shrine to the Virgin Mary though.

North of Chinatown is Fatahillah Square, the centre of ​​Jakarta’s Old Town, dating from when the city was called Batavia and ruled by the Dutch. There are a number of surviving colonial era buildings around the square and neighbouring streets.

The square is a popular place (even in the wet season, after a heavy downpour) for locals to get their photos taken with dressed up ladies, military clad men, or on colourful bicycles which come with impractical headgear.

The City Hall of Batavia, built 1707-1710, is now the Jakarta History Museum, a moderately diverting place to understand the history of the city.

Before visiting the main thing I knew about Jakarta was how bad the traffic is. I could certainly see the potential, particularly during the wet season for epic traffic jams, but getting around was more straightforward than expected. There are a range of buses and trains, but I just used Grab cars, which usually cost less than $5 per trip. There were a lot of scooters, but seemingly just as many cars, many of them pretty flash. As expected there were some impressive loads carried on the back of scooters.