Goa Heritage and Beach — Old Goa, Fontainhas, a Spice Plantation and the Salcete Sand

Your driver meets you at Mopa or Dabolim, about an hour from Candolim from either direction, and the afternoon is free to settle in. Candolim is chosen as the first base because it is twenty-five minutes from Panaji and forty from Old Goa, and quieter than the Calangute strip next door. Walk down to Sinquerim beach below Fort Aguada for the sunset, and dinner at your own pace on the Candolim road.

Old Goa, the capital of Portuguese India until the eighteenth century, is ten kilometres east of Panaji and forty minutes from Candolim. The Basilica of Bom Jesus opens at nine (ten on Sundays) and is calmest then: the laterite Baroque facade, the gilded altar and the silver casket of St Francis Xavier. Across the road stand the Sé Cathedral of Santa Catarina with its Golden Bell and single surviving tower, the Church of St Francis of Assisi, and the Archaeological Museum in the convent behind it. Lunch in Panaji, then a walk on foot through Fontainhas, the Latin Quarter: tiled porches, ochre and blue houses, azulejo street names and the chapel of St Sebastian. The Church of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception on its white stairs ends the walk. Back to Candolim.

Check out and drive inland to Ponda, twenty-eight kilometres south-east of Panaji, where the plantations of the Goan interior grow pepper, cardamom, nutmeg, cinnamon, vanilla and areca under coconut and cashew. A guided walk of about an hour explains what each plant is, how it is harvested and what it is worth, and is followed by a Goan lunch on banana leaf; the farms open from nine and the tour is best taken before the midday heat. In the afternoon continue south through Margao to the Salcete coast at Colva, an hour from Ponda, and the second base. The evening on the sand.

A morning drive of about an hour south along the coast to Cabo de Rama, the medieval hillfort on the cape the Portuguese held from the 1760s: a gateway, a small working church, cannon on the ramparts and the whole forested coast towards Agonda beneath the walls. There is no ticket and rarely a crowd. Return by the fishing villages of Betul and Cavelossim on the Sal estuary, with lunch on the way, and the rest of the day at Colva or Benaulim — twenty-five kilometres of white sand from Cabo de Rama to Bogmalo, and the beach the south was known for before Palolem. If your dates fall in October, the Fama festival at the Church of Our Lady of Mercy fills the village.

Breakfast, a last walk on the beach if the flight allows, and the drive to Dabolim: Colva is twenty-eight kilometres from the airport, about forty-five minutes, which is why the itinerary ends in the south rather than back at Candolim. For a flight from Mopa allow two and a quarter hours instead. The package ends at the airport.