Vagator

I climbed up to Chapora Fort on a motorbike, which is the only honest way to do it — up a red laterite track through the cashew scrub, past a chai stall where a man was deep asleep in a hammock, and out onto the ramparts where the wind came in hard off the Arabian Sea. The fort is a 17th-century Portuguese construction built on even older foundations, ruined enough to be interesting but intact enough to walk, and from its bastions you can see the entire northern Goa coastline — Chapora River mouth to the east, Vagator Beach below, Anjuna and Baga disappearing south into the haze.

There is a scene in the Bollywood film Dil Chahta Hai — three friends sitting on these exact battlements at sunset — that has given Chapora Fort a particular place in Indian popular culture. I knew this before I went. What I didn’t know was that the scene captures something true: these battlements in that light are the kind of view that makes even reserved people go very quiet. The red laterite walls pick up the colour of the sun and for twenty minutes at dusk the whole ruin is the same shade as the sky.

Below the fort, Vagator Beach splits into two distinct sections — Big Vagator and Little Vagator — separated by a rocky headland. Little Vagator is the smaller, quieter, more dramatic: a tight crescent of sand cupped between volcanic rock formations and the red laterite cliffs that rise sharply behind it. I spent an afternoon there when the tide was out and the rock pools held small fish and sea anemones, and a pair of cows stood at the waterline with an air of immovable contemplation. The crowd at Little Vagator skews towards the sort of traveler who has found Anjuna too busy — which at peak season it genuinely is — and the atmosphere is accordingly more relaxed, more actual silence between the beach shacks.

Vagator village itself, set back from the cliffs in the coconut groves, has a cluster of restaurants and guesthouses that represent what North Goa beach living looked like before it became an industry. The places are older, the menus more genuinely local, the wifi worse. I ate fish curry at a place where three generations of the same family were either cooking, serving, or doing homework at a corner table. The curry was the colour of turmeric and smelled of kokum and the fish was pulled from the water that morning.

The Chapora River mouth, just north of the fort, has a particular stillness in the mornings — fishing boats tied up at the small jetty, herons on the sandbanks, the river running dark and quiet before the breeze picks up. I kayaked out here once at dawn and the whole scene felt extremely removed from the beach shack version of Goa — which is the version that gets photographed and sold and replicated. This version had mud and birds and complete silence except for the water.

When to go: November through March. Chapora Fort is technically accessible year-round but the path becomes treacherous in the monsoon. For the famous Dil Chahta Hai sunset, arrive at the fort an hour before sundown and claim a spot on the eastern bastion — it faces the river and the light is better than from the western side.