Kochi

Kochi — long anglicised as Cochin — is the most cosmopolitan city on India's southwest coast, and one of the oldest continuously trading ports in the country. For more than six hundred years the world came here for pepper, cardamom and cloves, and every wave of arrivals left something behind. Arab, Chinese, Jewish, Portuguese, Dutch and British threads are all still visible in the streets, the churches, the synagogue, the kitchens and the faces of the old quarters. The result is a place that feels less like a single city than a collage of histories stacked along the water, framed by palm-fringed backwaters and the wide, warm Arabian Sea.

The city spreads across a cluster of islands, peninsulas and a mainland core knitted together by bridges and ferries around a great natural harbour. Mainland Ernakulam is the modern, busy commercial heart, all traffic, malls and offices. Across the water, the peninsula of Fort Kochi and the adjoining district of Mattancherry are where the history lives — a low-rise, walkable tangle of colonial bungalows, godowns (warehouses) still fragrant with spice, art cafes and slow lanes best explored on foot or by bicycle. This split personality is Kochi's charm: you can spend a morning among 16th-century monuments and an evening on a glassy modern promenade watching container ships slide out to sea.

Kochi's signature image is the row of cantilevered Chinese fishing nets silhouetted against the sunset at the tip of Fort Kochi — introduced, by tradition, by traders from the court of Kublai Khan and still worked by hand today. Nearby stand the milestones of Kerala's colonial encounter: St Francis Church, said to be the oldest European-built church in India and once the resting place of Vasco da Gama; the Santa Cruz Basilica; the Portuguese-built, Dutch-renovated Mattancherry Palace with its extraordinary Hindu murals; and, at the end of a lane lined with antique and spice shops, the Paradesi Synagogue in the quarter still known as Jew Town. Few places in India pack so many strands of world history into so small a footprint.

But Kochi is not only a museum piece. It has reinvented itself as the cultural capital of Kerala, and the biennial Kochi-Muziris Biennale — India's largest contemporary art exhibition — has turned Fort Kochi's old warehouses into galleries admired far beyond the country. Add nightly performances of the region's great art forms, Kathakali dance-drama and the martial art Kalaripayattu, the breezy waterfront of Marine Drive in Ernakulam, and a food culture built on coconut, spice and the day's catch, and Kochi rewards curiosity in every direction.

Practically, Kochi is also the natural gateway to the rest of Kerala — the launch point for the backwaters of Alleppey, the tea hills of Munnar and a coast of quiet beaches and waterfalls. Two unhurried days do the city justice; more if you want to fold in day trips. Come for the history and the light on the water, and you will likely leave planning a return for everything the region holds beyond the harbour.