Fort Kochi

Where it sits. Fort Kochi occupies the northern tip of a peninsula on the seaward side of Kochi's harbour, in Kerala. It faces the Arabian Sea on one flank and the harbour mouth on the other, with the ships of the Cochin Port and the Southern Naval Command passing a few hundred metres offshore. Together with adjoining Mattancherry it forms what residents call Old Kochi or West Kochi; the three municipalities were merged into the Kochi Corporation in 1967. The harbour itself is young in geological terms — a flood in 1341 that wrecked the ancient port of Kodungallur scoured out this natural anchorage and made the fortunes of everything downstream of it.

The story behind it. Portuguese ships under Pedro Álvares Cabral reached Kochi in 1500, two years after Vasco da Gama landed further north at Kappad. The Raja of Kochi, under pressure from the Zamorin of Kozhikode, granted the Portuguese land in 1503 after Afonso de Albuquerque's forces intervened on his side, and allowed them to build Fort Emmanuel on the waterfront — the first European fort on Indian soil, and the source of the district's name. The settlement behind it included a wooden church rebuilt in stone in 1516, today St Francis Church, where Vasco da Gama was buried in 1524 before his remains were taken back to Portugal. Portuguese control lasted about 160 years. The Dutch took the town in 1663, demolished a great deal of Catholic institutional building, and held it for over a century until the British took over in 1795. Fort Kochi became a municipality on 1 November 1866, among the first in what is now Kerala. In January 1889 the Great Fire of Cochin destroyed roughly 300 houses and commercial buildings, which is why so much of the surviving streetscape reads late-nineteenth-century over earlier foundations.

What you actually see today. The Chinese fishing nets on the northern shore are the image everyone arrives for: cantilevered shore-operated lift nets, believed to have been introduced by Chinese traders in the fourteenth century, worked by teams of four or five men hauling on counterweighted beams of stone. They are photogenic and also genuinely still fished, though the catch is thin. Behind them, Vasco da Gama Square runs into a grid of low streets — Princess Street, Bastion Street, Burgher Street — lined with Portuguese, Dutch and British houses now largely converted to homestays and cafés. St Francis Church retains its punkah fans and its cenotaph slab. Santa Cruz Basilica, first built in the sixteenth century, was destroyed under the British and rebuilt at the end of the nineteenth, its interior painted in a saturated pastel scheme that surprises visitors expecting austerity. The Dutch Cemetery, consecrated in 1724, sits behind a wall on the beach road. A twenty-minute walk south into Mattancherry brings you to the Mattancherry Palace, whose murals from the Ramayana are among the finest surviving examples of Kerala temple painting, and to Jew Town, the Paradesi Synagogue with its hand-painted Cantonese floor tiles and eighteenth-century clock tower, and the spice godowns where pepper, ginger and turmeric are still graded and sacked. The Indo-Portuguese Museum, in the Bishop's House garden, holds altarpieces, vestments and processional silver salvaged from the peninsula's churches, and small halls around Fort Kochi stage nightly Kathakali performances that begin with the actors applying their own rice-paste and pigment make-up in front of the audience.

On screen and on the wall. Fort Kochi is the working backdrop of Malayalam cinema's home city, and its streets, godowns and ferry jetties turn up constantly in Kerala productions. Since 2012 it has also hosted the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, South Asia's largest contemporary art event, which converts the disused spice warehouses of Aspinwall House and Pepper House into gallery space for several months every other winter and has done more than anything else to change the neighbourhood's economy. National Geographic ranked Fort Kochi ninth among its top 25 destinations to explore for 2020.

Getting there and timing. Ferries cross from Ernakulam's main jetty in about twenty minutes for a few rupees and are far more pleasant than the road route around by Willingdon Island; low-floor buses run from Cochin International Airport, roughly 40 km north. The peninsula is small enough to walk end to end, and a bicycle covers Fort Kochi and Mattancherry comfortably. October to March is the dry, breezy season; the Cochin Carnival fills the last ten days of December and ends with the burning of a giant effigy of Pappanji on New Year's Eve. June to September is heavily wet, and April and May are humid enough to make midday walking unpleasant.