South Goa in Three Nights — Palolem, Agonda and the Cape at Cabo de Rama

Your driver meets you at Dabolim, the southern airport near Vasco; Palolem is about 67 km and an hour and three-quarters down the coast through Margao and the Canacona hills, so an arrival before mid-afternoon leaves the evening on the beach. Palolem is a crescent a mile long between two wooded headlands, and from either end you can see the whole of it. Settle in, walk it once at sunset, and eat at one of the shacks on the sand.

Boats from the Palolem sand take fifteen to twenty minutes round the northern headland to Butterfly Beach, a cove with no road to it, best in the morning before the day boats arrive; you can also reach it on foot through the forest if you would rather walk. Back at Palolem, lunch and the afternoon are your own. In the late afternoon the car takes you ten minutes north to Agonda, a three-kilometre beach in a village that has kept its building rules, and one of the four beaches in the state designated as turtle-nesting sites. The evening light on the boulders at its southern end is the reason to come at this hour. Return to Palolem.

A morning drive of about forty minutes north to Cabo de Rama, the hillfort on the cape that the Portuguese took from the Raja of Soonda in the 1760s. There is no ticket and no crowd: a gateway, a small church still in use, cannon on the walls and, from the ramparts, the whole forested coast running south towards Agonda with the sea on both sides of the headland. Allow two hours for the fort and the path down to the beach below it. Lunch back on the Canacona side, then the afternoon free at Palolem — the kayaks on the northern end of the bay are the best way to see it from the water.

Check out after breakfast and drive north through Margao, the commercial capital, to the Salcete coast at Colva and Benaulim: the long white strand that runs twenty-five kilometres from Cabo de Rama to Bogmalo, and the beach the south was famous for before Palolem. An hour on the sand, or the church at Colva if the October Fama festival is on, and then the twenty-eight kilometres to Dabolim for your flight. The package ends at the airport.