Old Goa

I got to Old Goa in the wrong way, which is to say by tour bus, pressed between a family from Pune who were eating chakli and a tour guide with a laminated umbrella. The guide stopped us at the Se Cathedral first and read from a laminated card about the Golden Bell. I stopped listening around the third sentence and just stood inside the cathedral instead, in the cool and the dimness, watching the light come through the high windows onto the flagstones. The church is enormous — the largest in Asia built by Europeans, the guide said at some point — and in the afternoon light it has the quality of a held breath.

But it was the Basilica of Bom Jesus that I stayed longest. The facade here is more restrained than the Se’s white-washed grandeur — it’s laterite stone and brick, faintly pink in the sun, and the interior holds the silver casket that contains the mortal remains of Francis Xavier, the Jesuit saint who arrived in Goa in 1542 and whose body, incorrupt for decades after his death, became one of the great relics of the Catholic world. Every ten years, the casket is brought down and opened for public veneration. I was not there for one of those occasions. I stood below the reliquary and looked up at the Baroque gilded retable behind the altar — all tortured gold, cherubs, columns — and felt the weight of what this place had been: the capital of the Estado da India, Portugal’s Asian empire, a city of 75,000 people in the 16th century when London was barely half that size.

The jungle has been reclaiming Old Goa for centuries. The city was abandoned after plague and the silting of the Mandovi River in the 18th century, and now what remains is scattered through forest — churches rising up from the trees, their laterite walls green with moss, their interiors cool and bat-haunted. I walked between them on an afternoon when most of the tour groups had left and the site was nearly empty. The Archaeological Museum is tucked into the old convent of St Francis of Assisi, and its courtyard — where Portuguese tombstones are propped against walls and a single large tree grows at the centre — has the quality of a place where time has settled like dust on every surface.

There is a particular quality of melancholy in Old Goa that I did not expect. It is not sad, exactly. It is more the feeling of standing in the skeleton of something that was once immense. The Viceroy’s arch, still standing on the riverbank, has an inscription asking those departing for Portugal to remember the land that made them. Most of them did not come back.

I went back a second time, alone, on a motorbike, before sunrise. The churches emerge differently in the early light — the gold of the laterite picking up pink, the white of the Se turning almost violet. A pair of priests walked between the Basilica and the Se, deep in conversation, their white cassocks catching the morning mist. A group of women arranged flowers at a shrine by the road. The birds were extremely loud. For about twenty minutes, Old Goa felt like what it once was: a living city, not a monument.

When to go: November through March. The December feast day of St Francis Xavier (December 3rd) brings enormous crowds to the Basilica. Arrive early — before 9am — on any visit if you want the site without tour groups. The monsoon months render some paths inaccessible but also drape the ruins in extraordinary green.