Take any mid-sized Portuguese town, add a sprinkling of banana trees and auto-rickshaws, drench annually with torrential tropical rain, and leave to simmer in fierce humid sunshine for at least one hundred and fifty years, and you'll end up with something like PANJIM (also known by its Maharathi name, Panaji - "land that does not flood"). The Goan capital has a completely different feel from any other Indian city. Stacked around the sides of a lush terraced hillside at the mouth of the River Mandovi, its skyline of red-tiled roofs, whitewashed churches, and mildewing concrete apartment blocks has more in common with Lisbon than Lucknow. This lingering European influence is most evident in the small squares and cobbled lanes of the town's old Latin quarter, Fontainhas . Here, Portuguese is still very much the lingua franca, the shop fronts sport names like José Pinto and de Souza, and the women wear knee-length dresses that would turn heads anywhere else in the country.

 

For centuries, Panjim was little more than a minor landing stage and customs house, protected by a hilltop fort, and surrounded by stagnant swampland. It only became capital in 1843, after the port at Old Goa had silted up, and its rulers and impoverished inhabitants had fled the plague. Although the last Portuguese viceroy managed to drain many of the nearby marshes, and erect imposing public buildings on the new site, the town never emulated the grandeur of its predecessor upriver - a result, in part, of the Portuguese nobles' predilection for erecting their mansions in the countryside rather than the city. Panjim expanded rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s, without reaching the unmanageable proportions of other Indian state capitals. After Mumbai, or even Bangalore, its uncongested streets seem easy-going and pleasantly parochial. Sights are thin on the ground, but the palm-lined squares and atmospheric Latin quarter, with its picturesque Neoclassical houses and Catholic churches, make a pleasant backdrop for aimless wandering.

Some travellers see no more of Panjim than its noisy bus terminal - which is a pity. Although you can completely bypass the town when you arrive in Goa, either by jumping off the train or coach at Margao (for the south), or Mapusa (for the northern resorts), or by heading straight off on a local bus, it's definitely worth spending time here - if only a couple of hours en route to the ruined former capital at Old Goa.

The area around Panjim attracts far fewer visitors than the coastal resorts, yet its paddy fields and wooded valleys harbour several attractions worth a day or two's break from the beach. Old Goa is just a bus ride away, as are the unique temples around Ponda , an hour or so southeast, to where Hindus smuggled their deities during the Inquisition. Further inland still, the forested lower slopes of the Western Ghats, cut through by the main Panjim-Bangalore highway, shelter the impressive Dudhsagar falls , which you can only reach by four-wheel-drive Jeep.