Place · Portuguese colonial capital · India

Old Goa

Function

Trade & production

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

15.500, 73.912

Worth knowing

Francis Xavier's body lies here and is exposed roughly every ten years. The Baroque template worked out in Goa was exported to Macau, Manila and Brazil — Goa is a node in a global architecture, not a provincial copy.

Connections (32)

• Site adjacencyBasilica of Bom Jesus, Old Goa

  Old Goa is a complex rather than a city now — the Sé, Bom Jesus, St Francis of Assisi and the tower of St Augustine standing in open ground where a population reputedly larger than Lisbon's lived until cholera and the silting of the Mandovi emptied it. Bom Jesus, holding Francis Xavier's body, set the Baroque template that Portuguese and Jesuit building carried on to Macau, Manila and Brazil.

• CampaignColachel

  Marthanda Varma of Travancore defeated a Dutch East India Company force at Colachel in 1741 and took its commander Eustachius De Lannoy prisoner, then employed him to modernise the Travancore army — which he did for the next thirty years. It is one of very few clear Asian victories over a European naval power in the period, and it ended Dutch ambitions on the Malabar coast that the Portuguese at Goa had begun two centuries earlier.

• Trade routeMattancherry Palace, Kochi

  The Mattancherry palace was built by the Portuguese about 1555 as a gift to the raja of Cochin, in exchange for trading privileges and in compensation for a temple their men had sacked. Its murals of the Ramayana and of Krishna are among the finest in Kerala. It is the characteristic Portuguese arrangement on this coast: a European power dependent on a local ruler it could not displace, paying in architecture.

• Traveller routeHampi / Vijayanagara

  Niccolò de' Conti reached Vijayanagara in the 1420s during twenty-five years of travel in the East, and his account survives only because Poggio Bracciolini wrote it down in Latin at the papal court — Conti had converted to Islam under duress and told his story as penance. The route given here is representative: the chronology is reconstructed and uncertain, as it is for most of his itinerary.

• Trade routeSurat

  Goa and Surat were the Portuguese and Mughal empires' principal western ports, and the rivalry between them shaped the Arabian Sea for two centuries — Portuguese cartazes licensing Mughal shipping, Surat's Hajj traffic depending on Portuguese permission, and the English eventually displacing both. Goa emptied as its trade went; Surat emptied when Bombay took its.

• Imperial administration ofSt Paul's Church, Diu

  Diu, Daman and Goa were the last Portuguese possessions in India, held until the Indian army took them in December 1961 — four hundred and fifty years after Albuquerque and fourteen years after the British left. Diu's fort and St Paul's church survive almost intact because the place stopped being commercially important early and nobody had reason to rebuild over it.

• Succession in timeSt Francis Church, Kochi

  St Francis at Kochi was built in 1503 and Old Goa's great churches a century later, so the two mark the beginning and the height of Portuguese building in India. Kochi's church has been Catholic, then Dutch Protestant after 1663, then Anglican, then Church of South India, each conquest changing the denomination and leaving the walls; Goa's remained Catholic throughout and lost its city instead, emptied by cholera and malaria until only the churches were left standing in the vegetation.

• Life routeJoseph Vaz

  Vaz was a Konkani priest of the Goan church who left Portuguese territory precisely to work outside it, crossing into Dutch Ceylon in 1687 disguised as a labourer at a time when Catholic priesthood there carried a death sentence. He represents the point at which Indian clergy, trained under the Padroado at Goa, began running missions on their own account rather than serving European ones — which is why the Oratory he came from mattered.

• Succession in timeSilvassa

  Dadra and Nagar Haveli were taken from Portugal by volunteers in 1954 without the Indian government's involvement, and ran themselves for seven years. Goa took until December 1961 and took the army, because Salazar had made Goa constitutionally a province of Portugal rather than a colony and would not negotiate at all. The thirty-six-hour operation drew international criticism and was, in India, the single most popular thing Nehru's government ever did.

• CampaignMaḥmūd Gāwān

  Gawan took Goa from Vijayanagara for the Bahmanis in 1472, which gave the sultanate its Arabian Sea outlet and its horse trade — Persian and Arab cavalry mounts, the one import the Deccan states could not do without. The Portuguese took the same port from the Adil Shahis thirty-eight years later for exactly the same reason, and the horse trade is most of why the Estado da India was viable at all.

• CampaignAfonso de Albuquerque

  Albuquerque took Goa from the Adil Shahi governor in March 1510, lost it in May, and retook it on 25 November with a larger fleet. He chose the island because it was defensible, had a shipyard and a working customs house, and lay between the Malabar pepper and the Gujarat cotton trades. The capital of the Estado moved here from Cochin within a generation.

• Image migrationPonda

  The temples of Salcete and Bardez were demolished in the sixteenth century under the Old Conquests' religious laws, and their congregations carried the images across the Zuari into Adil Shahi and then Maratha Ponda, where they were re-enshrined. Shanta Durga, Mangueshi and Mahalasa are Goan village deities in exile a few kilometres from the villages that still fund them.

• Power passed toHooghly–Chinsurah

  Portuguese private traders had a fortified settlement at Hooghly from 1579 until Shah Jahan's governor Qasim Khan stormed it in 1632 for piracy and slave-raiding in the delta. The survivors regrouped downriver at Bandel. Portugal never recovered a position in Bengal, and the river that the Estado lost is the one the Dutch, French, Danes and English then divided between them.

• Power passed toNew Delhi, Lutyens' plan

  Portugal refused to negotiate over Goa after 1947, arguing that it was not a colony but metropolitan territory. Nehru's government, under pressure after the 1955 satyagraha was fired on, sent the army in on 18 December 1961; the Governor-General surrendered the next day. Lisbon recognised the transfer only in 1974, after the Carnation Revolution ended the Estado Novo.

• Imperial administration ofLisbon

  Lisbon and Old Goa are the two ends of the carreira da Índia, a voyage of six to eight months each way with one sailing window a year. The Casa da Índia in Lisbon held the monopoly and Goa held the customs house, and everything in between — including Paes's horses and his chronicle — moved on that single annual rhythm.

• Imperial administration ofEstado da Índia — Portuguese India

  Old Goa is the seat: Velha Goa was the capital of the Estado da Índia from its capture from Bijapur in 1510 until malaria drove the city to New Goa in 1843. The Portuguese kept the viceroy, the Inquisition, the archbishopric of the whole Padroado east of the Cape and the Casa da Índia here across three centuries, and it is the one place where every ministry of the Estado can still be walked to on foot.

• Site withinBasilica of Bom Jesus, Old Goa

  Basilica of Bom Jesus, Old Goa sits inside Old Goa and forms one piece of its layered sacred, royal or civic landscape. The city carries this entry as one of the sites that make its urban fabric legible — a shrine, monument, institution or craft tradition specifically anchored at this location — and the city's broader history reads better when the stop is seen in its context rather than in isolation. The surrounding streets, markets and other heritage ensembles around it belong to the same single city.

• Site withinSe Cathedral, Old Goa

  Se Cathedral, Old Goa sits inside Old Goa and forms one piece of its layered sacred, royal or civic landscape. The city carries this entry as one of the sites that make its urban fabric legible — a shrine, monument, institution or craft tradition specifically anchored at this location — and the city's broader history reads better when the stop is seen in its context rather than in isolation. The surrounding streets, markets and other heritage ensembles around it belong to the same single city.

• Site withinVasco da Gama, Goa

  Vasco da Gama, Goa sits inside Old Goa and forms one piece of its layered sacred, royal or civic landscape. The city carries this entry as one of the sites that make its urban fabric legible — a shrine, monument, institution or craft tradition specifically anchored at this location — and the city's broader history reads better when the stop is seen in its context rather than in isolation. The surrounding streets, markets and other heritage ensembles around it belong to the same single city.

• Site withinChandor, Goa

  Chandor, Goa sits inside Old Goa and forms one piece of its layered sacred, royal or civic landscape. The city carries this entry as one of the sites that make its urban fabric legible — a shrine, monument, institution or craft tradition specifically anchored at this location — and the city's broader history reads better when the stop is seen in its context rather than in isolation. The surrounding streets, markets and other heritage ensembles around it belong to the same single city.

• Site withinChurch of St Francis of Assisi, Old Goa

  The Church of St Francis of Assisi is on the Old Goa monumental ensemble, west of the Se Cathedral.

• Site withinChurch of St Cajetan, Old Goa

  St Cajetan stands at the north-east corner of the Old Goa ensemble.

• Site withinChapel of St Catherine, Old Goa

  St Catherine Chapel is at the western edge of the Old Goa ensemble on the Mandovi.

• Site withinConvent of St Monica, Old Goa

  Convent of St Monica stands on Monte Santo, the Holy Hill ridge within the Old Goa site.

• Site withinChurch of St. Augustine (ruins), Goa

  St Augustine Tower rises on Monte Santo above the Old Goa monumental ensemble.

• Site adjacencyFort Aguada, Bardez

  Fort Aguada at the mouth of the Mandovi was the seaward defence for Old Goa's harbour, 20 km downstream across the river from the capital ensemble.

• Site adjacencyChapora Fort, Bardez

  Chapora Fort on the Bardez coast was the northern defensive post of Portuguese Goa, 25 km north of the Old Goa ensemble.

• Site adjacencyReis Magos Fort

  Reis Magos Fort on the north bank of the Mandovi opposite Panaji was the first arrival stop for Portuguese viceroys sailing to Old Goa.

• Site adjacencyMangueshi Temple, Ponda

  Mangueshi temple at Ponda, 20 km east of Old Goa, was rebuilt here in 1738 after the deity was moved from the Zuari-river village the Portuguese anti-Hindu edicts of 1540-67 destroyed.

• Site adjacencyShantadurga Temple, Kavlem

  Shantadurga temple at Kavlem, Ponda, 25 km east of Old Goa, was rebuilt here in 1738 after the deity was moved from the Zuari-river village the Portuguese anti-Hindu edicts of 1540-67 destroyed.

• Life routeVasco da Gama

  Da Gama's 1502 and 1524 expeditions landed and provisioned at Goa, which Afonso de Albuquerque made the capital of the Portuguese Estado da India in 1510 — twelve years after Da Gama's first voyage opened the Cape Route in 1498.

• Life routeLuís Vaz de Camões

  Camões lived in Portuguese Goa and Macao between 1553 and 1570 after being exiled from Lisbon for a street brawl; much of Os Lusíadas was written during the Goa years. His manuscript is said to have survived a shipwreck off the Mekong on his return voyage.

On these journeys

• Early modern ports & companies
• UNESCO World Heritage — cultural
• Domingo Paes — a Portuguese eye on Vijayanagara (c. 1520)
• Portuguese India — 1498 to 1961
• Decolonisation, partition and integration

Sources

Churches and Convents of Goa — UNESCO

• Wikipedia