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Landour offers striking views of the [[Garhwal]] [[Himalaya]], with a wide vista of up to 200 kms (125 miles) visible from West to East on a clear day. The views are even better than those from Mussoorie. The visible massifs and peaks include (West to East) Swargarohini, Bandarpoonch, Yamnotri, Gangotri, Kedarnath, Chaukhamba (Badrinath) and even Nanda Devi. At its closest point, [[Tibet]] is about 70 miles (110 kms) away; it is through Landour that [[Heinrich Harrer]] escaped to Tibet during World War II after breaking out of a British internment camp in [[Dehradun]].
The denizens of Landour Cantonment, in particular, are known to guard their privacy jealously. Many of them, in their "other lives", are part of The High & Mighty in the national capital of Delhi. (Some are less high and less mighty than in their self-image, of course). Privacy aside, the locus of Landour Cantonment is so-called "Char Dukan" (or "four shops"), where locals and tourists park themselves for a sandwich, a cuppa, a bit o' gossip or just a rest. Char Dukan is on the way to the tourist lookout spot of "New" [[Lal Tibba]] ("Old" Lal Tibba having been taken over in 1975 by Doordarshan and All India Radio to build a towering mega-transmitter). Char Dukan can get a bit crowded during the day in the summer when droves of budget tourists flock to New Lal Tibba.
Architecturally speaking, Landour is akin to other Raj-era hill stations of Northern India. Since Mussoorie-Landour never rivalled [[Shimla]] in administrative, political or military terms, there are few 'grand official buildings' to speak of. The private homes are largely the commonplace Raj-era ''pastiches'', with pitched roofs (usually painted a dull red). Most homes do have a verandah, important given the heavy monsoons. About the only "architecturally significant" building was The Castle on the aptly-named Castle Hill, now part of [[Survey of India]], where the deposed boy-king [[Duleep Singh]] of Punjab, the son of the iconic Maharaja [[Ranjit Singh]], was often "kept" for convalescent purposes in the 1850s and 1860s. The [[Amir]] of [[Afghanistan]] too was in the town in quasi-exile at various times in the early 20th Century as Raj officials engaged in their customary machinations of map-drawing and re-drawing across the Subcontinent. Landour has two Raj-era churches, both very much in use today: [[Kellogg Church]] (which is also home to the popular [[Landour Language School]]) and [[St. Paul's Church]] in Char Dukan, where [[Jim Corbett]]'s parents married in 1869. A third Methodist church in Landour Bazaar fell into disuse after the Raj ended and was eventually seized by squatters for commercial purposes by way of '[[kabza]]'.
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