Cochin Cruise

Spreading across islands and promontories between the Arabian Sea and the backwaters, Kochi (long known as Cochin) is Kerala’s prime tourist destination.

In Fort Cochin, spice markets, Chinese fishing nets, a synagogue, a Portuguese palace, India’s first European church and seventeenth-century Dutch homes can all be found within an easy walk. As you approach by cruise ship, the waterfront, with its sloping red-tiled roofs and ranks of peeling, pastel-coloured godowns (warehouses), offers a view that can have changed little in centuries.
Fort Cochin, the grid of old streets at the north-west tip of the peninsula, is where the Portuguese erected their first walled citadel, Fort Immanuel, which the Dutch East Indian Company later consolidated with a circle of well-fortified ramparts. Only a few fragments of the former battlements remain but dozens of other evocative European-era monuments survive: the early eighteenth-century Dutch Cemetery, Vasco da Gama’s supposed house and several traders’ residences.