Let’s help you
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Explore responsibly, discover offbeat places, guided by locals, rooted in culture.
Let’s help you
plan your journey
Explore responsibly, discover offbeat places, guided by locals, rooted in culture.
Soumen Bhowmick
Soumen Bhowmick founded Pollen Dots in 2024 to plan journeys across India and Bhutan. He works in the Commercial Department of Indian Railways, where he has been since 2000. From 2016 to 2020 he was Head of Business Development and Partnerships at ScoutMyTrip, a community-driven road trip planning platform. There he built a nationwide network of local Scouts who helped travellers on the road, and grew the Road Trippers Club to 16 Indian cities. As a core member of Devil On Wheels, he helped travellers plan Himalayan trips and started Spreading Smiles. He has driven solo from Arunachal to Goa and from Himachal to Karnataka, and has run his own caravan for more than ten years. His photographs have won national and international salon awards, and his writing has appeared in Outlook Traveller.
Most lists of places to visit in Goa are a list of beaches with a church at the end. Goa's eastern half holds four protected areas covering roughly 750 square kilometres and a twelfth century temple that outlived every other one of its kind. The waterfall everyone photographs cannot legally be walked to, and the coast is one of four things worth planning around rather than the only one.
Goa does not arrange itself into a loop either. The World Heritage churches are at Old Goa near Panjim, the sanctuaries run along the Karnataka border, and the turtle beaches sit at the two far ends of the coast. The preparation guide for travelling in India covers the bookings that decide how many of these fit in one trip.
One property, at Old Goa. The Churches and Convents of Goa were inscribed in 1986, a group of religious buildings in the former Portuguese capital about ten kilometres east of Panjim.
The Basilica of Bom Jesus, which holds the tomb of St Francis Xavier, and the Se Cathedral are the two most visited. The ruined Church of St Augustine on the hill above them is the one most people walk past.
The Western Ghats property is the one that causes confusion. It was inscribed in 2012 with thirty-nine component sites in Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra. None of them is in Goa, so Mhadei and Mollem are not UNESCO sites whatever a listing page says.
Four sit along the Western Ghats edge, and Bhagwan Mahavir with Mollem National Park is the largest at around 240 square kilometres.
Together they cover roughly 750 square kilometres. In a state this small, the forest is not a side trip from the coast so much as the other half of the place.
By the Forest Department jeep from Kulem, which is also spelt Collem. No other road access is sanctioned and private vehicles do not go past the village.
Walking the railway line from Castle Rock or Kulem is banned. The track is live, the railways treat it as trespass, and the Railway Protection Force polices it.
The jeep safari is suspended through the monsoon, from around mid June until after October, and in 2025 it closed on 10 June. Accounts differ on whether a supervised forest trek runs in those months, and no official page settles it, so confirm on the day rather than on a blog.
At Tambdi Surla, inside the Bhagwan Mahavir sanctuary, about sixty-five kilometres from Panjim. The Mahadev temple there dates to the twelfth century and is protected by the Archaeological Survey of India.
It is the only structural temple of the Kadamba period left standing in Goa. The Kadambas ruled here between roughly the tenth and fourteenth centuries and built in basalt, which had to be carried in from outside the state.
The reason it survived is the reason it is hard to reach. It sits deep in forest at the foot of the Anmod ghat, far from everything that was later destroyed or rebuilt.
Four, notified under the Coastal Regulation Zone notification of 2011: Morjim, Ashwem with Mandrem, Agonda and Galgibaga. Two are in the north and two in Canacona in the far south.
Nesting runs roughly October to April, which is the tourist season almost exactly. Forest Department figures reported in the state press put Morjim and Mandrem at 276 nests in 2024-25, against eight a decade earlier.
The rules differ between them. Sun beds and shacks are kept off Agonda and Galgibaga during nesting and are allowed at Morjim, which is also one of the busiest beaches in the north. Who absorbs the cost of that overlap is the question ecotourism in India and whether local communities benefit deals with.
Three things, and each works differently.
The falls are at their heaviest in the months you cannot easily reach them. Our six day slow coastal journey through Goa is built around that calendar. Journeys Just for You does the same to your own dates.
One, the Churches and Convents of Goa at Old Goa, inscribed in 1986. The Western Ghats property, inscribed in 2012, has thirty-nine component sites in Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra and none in Goa.
No. The railway-track walk from Castle Rock or Kulem is banned and enforced by the Railway Protection Force, and the line is live. The only sanctioned road access is the Forest Department jeep from Kulem.
The Mahadev temple at Tambdi Surla, inside the Bhagwan Mahavir sanctuary. It dates to the twelfth century and is the only structural Kadamba-period temple still standing in the state. It is protected by the Archaeological Survey of India.
At Morjim, Ashwem with Mandrem, Agonda and Galgibaga, the four beaches notified under the Coastal Regulation Zone notification of 2011. Nesting runs roughly October to April and overlaps the peak tourist season.