Anjuna

Where it sits. Anjuna is a census town on the North Goa coast, 18 km from Panaji and 8 km west of Mapusa, and one of the twelve comunidades of Bardez — the old Portuguese village land-holding units that still shape property and parish boundaries here. Its beach forms part of a thirty-kilometre run of coastline along the Arabian Sea, but Anjuna's own stretch is atypical: instead of an unbroken strand it is a series of sandy pockets divided by low outcrops of black volcanic rock, with a laterite cliff behind holding cafés and guesthouses. Chapora Fort is visible on its headland to the north, and Vagator's coves sit between the two.

The story behind it. The name most likely comes from Arabic — the historian Teresa Albuquerque traces it to hanjuman, a merchants' guild, while another reading connects it to a word for exchanging money, which fits a landing place where traders arrived by sea. St Michael's Church, founded in 1595, is the parish centre and keeps two feasts: St Michael on 29 September and Nossa Senhora Advogada in the second week of January. Three large chapels serve the outlying wards, and the chapel at Vagator became a parish church of its own in the twentieth century. Anjuna was an ordinary Goan farming and fishing village of about 5,700 people in 1950. Then, in the late 1960s, it landed on the overland hippie trail, and for two decades it was the terminus of that route — a place where Western travellers stayed for entire seasons in rented village houses. Eight Finger Eddie, an American who arrived in the mid-1960s, is generally credited with establishing the scene; Goa Gil, who spent decades here, is credited with turning the parties into something musically specific.

Why the music matters. Goa trance was born on this beach. The genre took shape through all-night parties on the sand and in the palm groves through the 1980s and early 1990s, when DJs played reel-to-reel tapes edited to remove vocals and stretch the mixes, and it became one of the very few globally exported electronic music styles that carries an Indian place name. Its influence outlived the parties: the British duo Above & Beyond named their record labels Anjunabeats and Anjunadeep after this village, along with their long-running radio show, and released a track called "Anjunabeach" in 2009. Police restrictions on amplified music after 22:00 have pushed the scene largely to licensed clubs and to Vagator, so what remains on the sand itself is quieter than its reputation.

On screen. Goa's northern beach belt became Hindi cinema's shorthand for escape largely through Dil Chahta Hai (2001), whose road-trip sequences were shot along this coast and whose most reproduced frame was taken on the ramparts of Chapora Fort — the fort you can see from Anjuna's sand, a fifteen-minute scooter ride north. The market, the cliff cafés and the rock pools have since carried location work for a long run of Hindi films set among young people on holiday, to the point where the visual clichés of the genre — motorbike on a coast road, guitar on a cliff, sunrise on an emptying beach — were largely assembled here.

What you actually see today. The Wednesday flea market is the institution. It started as travellers selling their own possessions to fund another month and is now a large commercial affair spread across a field near the southern end of the beach, running from morning until about 19:30, selling textiles, silver, leather, spices, instruments and a great deal of imported tat. A separate Saturday night market operates nearby in season. The beach itself has shacks with sunbeds, decent body-surfing when the swell is up, and rocks at either end worth exploring at low tide. Anjuna is also a long-standing base for yoga and bodywork schools, and the village retains handsome Portuguese-era houses with deep verandahs, ochre and indigo lime-washed walls and oyster-shell window panes behind the tourist strip. The population has grown from 5,688 in 1950 to 9,636 at the 2011 census, and the seasonal influx multiplies that several times over between December and February.

Getting there and timing. Goa's Dabolim airport is about 45 km south and Manohar International at Mopa roughly 30 km north; Thivim is the nearest railway station. Almost everyone rides a rented scooter. The season runs October to April, with December and January busiest and priciest; the flea market and most shacks operate only within that window. May is very hot, and from June to September the monsoon closes the shacks, empties the village and turns the sea dangerous, though the cliffs and paddy fields are at their most beautiful.