Jakarta Just Became the World's Largest City. Almost Nobody Noticed.
The United Nations recently designated Jakarta the world's most populous city, home to nearly 42 million people, surpassing Dhaka (roughly 40 million) and Tokyo (approximately 33 million). Yet on the morning of the city's 499th birthday celebration, a travel writer scanning the crowd at the central street festival found himself, by his own account, the only Western face in sight. That gap between Jakarta's scale and its tourist footprint is precisely what makes it worth paying attention to right now.
A City That Rewards the Curious
Every Sunday, Jakarta closes its central streets to traffic from 6am to 11am, giving residents a rare window of open space in one of the world's most congested urban environments. For a visitor, it is one of the most accessible entry points into daily life here, and a reminder that the city has a rhythm entirely its own.
The historic Kota Tua district (Old Jakarta) preserves Dutch colonial architecture along the Kali Besar Canal and around Fatahillah Square, where visitors rent pushbikes to explore. Sunda Kelapa, the old port, still has 18th-century whitewashed maritime buildings, though seawater is visibly encroaching on the wharfside area where traditional wooden pinisi vessels are moored. Parts of North Jakarta have sunk 2.5 metres in the past decade, and projections suggest portions of the city could be submerged by 2050, a fact that lends a certain urgency to visiting its heritage areas.
Where to Stay: Two Very Different Options
The 289-room Hotel Indonesia Kempinski opened in 1962 as Indonesia's first five-star property and sits opposite the Bundaran HI roundabout, the city's most photographed landmark. Rooms start from around $190 a night. It connects directly to the Grand Indonesia shopping mall and carries genuine historical weight, having featured in both the 1978 Christopher Koch novel and the 1982 Peter Weir film The Year of Living Dangerously.
At the other end of the spectrum is the 25-room House of Tugu in Kota Tua, which TIME magazine listed among its world's greatest places for 2026. Opened after two decades of planning, it functions as a living museum, displaying roughly 1,000 antiques collected over nearly 60 years by the Setjadibrata family, co-owners of the Tugu Hotels group. Rooms start from around $224 a night. A new museum wing is due to open in the near future to house additional pieces currently in storage.
Lucienne Anhar, whose family owns the property, put it plainly to the writer: "For many foreign visitors, Indonesia means Bali. And Bali is wonderful, but Indonesia is much bigger and culturally much more complicated than Bali alone."
Hans Joerg Meier, managing director of Legian Hotel Management, was equally direct: "I'm convinced that Jakarta will become a destination city like Bangkok in a few years. Visit now before everyone goes."
Getting There
Garuda Indonesia operates six flights a week between Sydney and Jakarta, and four flights a week between Melbourne and Jakarta. Domestic connections from Jakarta to Denpasar, Bali, run regularly and take under two hours.
Why It Matters for Hosts
Independent operators in Jakarta are sitting in front of a window that is open but not yet crowded. The city's near-total absence of Western leisure tourists means that properties offering genuine cultural context, clear English-language communication, and honest guidance on navigating traffic and neighborhoods have an outsized advantage. Practical information about the Sunday car-free hours, Kota Tua walking routes, and the sinking-city geography of North Jakarta costs nothing to provide and meaningfully differentiates a listing. Travelers who seek out Jakarta specifically are self-selecting for curiosity over comfort, and they respond to hosts who treat the city's complexity as an asset rather than an apology.
The details in this post were first reported by Anthony Dennis for The Sydney Morning Herald's Traveller section. The writer traveled with assistance from The Legian Seminyak resort and paid for his own Jakarta accommodation. This post is published by the Qontaktly travel blog.
First reported by smh.com.au.