Chandor

I got to Chandor by asking my guesthouse owner in Margao to write the name of the village in Konkani script for the autorickshaw driver, because Google Maps at the time had two different villages with similar names and I’d already wasted an afternoon going to the wrong one. The village of Chandor — about fifteen kilometres east of Margao, up in the gentle laterite hills — turned out to be forty minutes on a road that got progressively quieter until we were moving through rice paddies and cashew orchards and the only sounds were the engine and the birds.

Braganza House is the reason people come to Chandor, and it is one of the most astonishing private buildings I have encountered in India. The mansion was built in the 17th century by the Braganza family — Goan Catholics of the sort that accumulated land, education, and political influence under the Portuguese — and it stretches across the village square in a facade of whitewashed laterite so wide it looks like two houses joined: which is exactly what it is. The estate passed to two branches of the family and was divided down the middle, and today the east wing is maintained by the Menezes Braganza family and the west wing by the Braganza Pereiras. Both branches live in their respective halves. You can visit both.

A member of the Menezes Braganza family — an elderly woman who introduced herself simply as the custodian — showed me through the east wing on a Tuesday afternoon. The ballroom is the size of a small church, with Portuguese tile floors and portrait paintings of ancestors in high starched collars and a crystal chandelier that she told me had been brought from Belgium in the 1880s. The ballroom leads to the salon, which leads to the dining room, which leads to the chapel — a full private chapel with an altar, pews, and a relic of St Francis Xavier given to the family in the 16th century. The rooms were cool and smelled of old wood and beeswax. Through the tall arched windows, the garden — gone somewhat wild — showed the afternoon light in long strips across the floor.

What struck me was not the grandeur, which I had been told about, but the liveness of it. The furniture is used. The books in the library are read. Family photographs sit on surfaces among the antiques. A cat was asleep on what appeared to be a 17th-century Portuguese cabinet. The Menezes Braganza family has not turned their inheritance into a museum. They live in it, casually, with the history.

The village of Chandor itself is extremely quiet. There is a small church at the square with a lovely baroque door, a few shops selling chips and biscuits, and a village well that still functions. On the road coming in, I had passed a woman carrying a basket of jackfruit on her head and a man cutting the verge with a hand scythe. This is the rural Goa that the beach coast covers over — the Goa of slow agricultural time, of church bells and feast days, of houses where the television competes with the grandmother’s rosary.

When to go: October through March. Braganza House receives visitors most mornings from around 10am, though hours are informal — call ahead or arrive early to find a family member available. The village feast day in January transforms the quiet square with a brass band and cooking smells that drift for a kilometre. Avoid the monsoon months, when the road in from Margao can flood.