Getting there
Sonargaon sits about 25–30 kilometers southeast of Dhaka, roughly a 1–1.5 hour drive depending on traffic, making it a realistic half-day or full-day trip without needing to stay overnight.
What to see
- Panam City — a single street of roughly 50 abandoned merchant houses, built by wealthy Hindu merchants in the 19th and early 20th centuries and left empty after Partition in 1947.
- The Folk Art and Craft Museum — housed in the restored Goaldi Mansion, holding one of Bangladesh's better collections of traditional textiles, wood carving, and rickshaw art.
- Goaldi Mosque — a quieter, less-visited 15th-century stop nearby, worth adding if time allows.
Panam City is the centerpiece. The facades mix European colonial and local architectural styles, and the whole street has a genuinely eerie, frozen-in-time quality that's rare to find so close to a capital city.
Best time to visit
November through February again offers the most comfortable walking weather. Panam City in particular is more atmospheric with fewer visitors, so a weekday visit outside of the winter holiday rush is worth aiming for.
Practical notes
Panam City's houses are structurally fragile and mostly closed to interior access for safety reasons — the visit is about walking the street and viewing the facades rather than going inside. The Folk Art Museum has its own separate entry and typically closes one day a week, worth checking before making the trip.
This pairs naturally with a wider heritage circuit — see our historical and archaeological wonders guide for how it connects to Paharpur, Mahasthangarh, Puthia, and Sixty Dome Mosque.