Place · Portuguese port city · India
Vasco da Gama, Goa
The port city at Mormugao harbour in South Goa, 29 kilometres from Panaji — the deep-water harbour of Portuguese Goa from 1685 when the viceroy Francisco de Távora established a port at Mormugao Bay. The town was named Vasco da Gama by the Portuguese in the 19th century. The port handles iron-ore and manganese exports from the Western Ghats mines of Goa and Karnataka — Mormugao is India's seventh-busiest port by cargo volume. The 1510 Portuguese St Andrew Church, the 1824 Mormugao Fort, and the Western Railway terminus (built 1888 for the Portuguese Mormugao-Castle Rock railway) anchor the colonial heritage. The 2012 Goa iron-ore mining ban following the Supreme Court's environmental case significantly reduced Mormugao's cargo throughput; the port diversified to coal and container traffic.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 15.398, 73.812
Connections (3)
- AnalogueKappad beach, Kozhikode
Vasco da Gama town, at Mormugao, was named for the man who came ashore at Kappad four centuries earlier, and was built because the Mandovi at Old Goa had silted up. The harbour was given a metre-gauge railway to the Deccan in 1888 to carry British Indian cargo, so the Estado's last major port existed to serve the empire that had replaced it.
- Site withinOld 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.
- Life routeVasco da Gama
Vasco da Gama died in Cochin as Viceroy on 24 December 1524 and was first buried at the Church of St Francis in Cochin; his body was returned to Portugal in 1538. The modern Goan town of Vasco da Gama carries his name.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Vasco da Gama, Goa”. Charles Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire; the Historical Archives of Goa; UNESCO’s Churches and Convents of Goa file.
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