22/04/2020
Five centuries ago, the prolific Portuguese flag-planter Vasco da Gama made landfall south of here, at Calicut, and pointed his fellow colonists upcountry, importuning them to settle across Goa’s viridescent hills and plains, and to amass spices and converts to Catholicism in equal abundance. The missionaries erected tall, whitewashed churches (almost all now designated Unesco heritage sites) and dense villages of brightly painted houses up and down its coast and along the slow-moving rivers that cross it, winding westward to the Indian Ocean.
By the 1960s and 70s this temperate, tolerant, still largely inviolate Eden had drawn hippies and escapees from modern existence to its shores.
There are dozens of Goas: some are exclusive, others as as a pirate’s map, some a beachcomber’s dream of a cabin, empty dunes and pounding surf. A former Portuguese colony isolated in British India, Goa is India’s Latin quarter. It is tolerant and capricious. It has that easy-going lassitude found in tropical coasts from Costa Rica to Zanzibar. Goans speak about India as if it were a separate country, and Indians as if they were another people. Where India has colorful temples and adobe villages, Goa has bright white churches and Portuguese villas.
Goa is also India’s first Covid-19 free state. ITC Grand Goa
Text source CN Traveller and FT Howtospend it.
