Slightly forward of the Goa State Museum, sandwiched between eating places, the Centre for the Indo-Portuguese Arts is constructed inside a 200-year-old heritage home. A slender flight of stairs, with vintage artwork posters in Konkani, takes you to a small opening right into a retailer promoting hand-painted Indo-Portuguese tiles, Goan music, and uncommon books on Goa in Romi Konkani script. If you’re fortunate, the younger daughter of the proprietor, Orlando de Noronha, will greet you and take you across the retailer. Down the flight of stairs is an occasions area, additionally the world’s first home of Fado and Mandó. Fado is a music style from Portugal, and Mandó is a mode of music from Goa. Madragoa, a bimonthly occasion on the Centre, is an intersection of those two artwork kinds.
Tickets: Up to Rs1500 for occasions
Timings: 10am – 6:30pm; Monday – Saturday
Access: Taxi, pilot (bike taxi), rented scooter or native bus to Panjim, North Goa.
Big Foot
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Big Foot Goa
Set in the guts of South Goa’s Salcete taluka, a brief drive inland from the Zuari River, Loutolim feels far faraway from the Goa most guests know. Past fields and coconut groves, the village recollects a quieter Seventies Goa, unhurried and largely untouched by improvement. It was right here that Mario Miranda, certainly one of Goa’s most beloved cartoonists, was born, and his ancestral house nonetheless stands as a landmark. On the village’s edge, past baroque church buildings and Hindu temples, is certainly one of Goa’s oldest museums: Big Foot. Its title comes from a neighborhood legend of a person of uncommon generosity, examined by the gods and stripped of all he had. He bore his losses with out grievance till nothing remained. Moved, the gods pressed the mark of his foot into stone, an emblem of advantage that grew to become a website of petition the place villagers got here to make needs. Centuries later, conservationist and artist Maendra Alvares reimagined the positioning as a spot that might maintain Goa’s many tales. In 1994 he based Ancestral Goa, a restored model of his personal ancestral mansion, the Casa Araujo Alvares, turning it right into a museum of Indo-Portuguese home life with household antiques and heirlooms. Today, the home additionally opens its doorways for intimate meals and music gatherings. Alongside it, he created its counterpart, the Big Foot museum, which he envisioned to be a life-sized cultural report. To draw guests, he undertook an bold feat: carving a 14×10-foot laterite sculpture of the poet-saint Mirabai in only a month. The work earned him a spot in the Limca Book of Records in 1996 and have become the museum’s anchor. Today, Big Foot is an open-air park the place Goa’s story is instructed by means of life-sized tableaux: farmers bent over rice fields, ladies at fish markets, salt pans glinting in the solar, fishermen weaving coir nets, males distilling feni, even a village baker promoting poee and undo. Visitors make their manner by means of the park on a guided tour, usually led by Adriel Alvares, Maendra’s son, whose enthusiasm turns the installations into one thing greater than static shows. He begins with Goa’s oldest myths, Parashurama creating land from the ocean, the legend of Bambolim, even histories of slavery hardly ever acknowledged in vacationer brochures, earlier than transferring by means of agriculture, music, and festivals. An audio information provides a parallel narration, however it’s Adriel’s voice, half historical past lesson and half village gossip, that makes the expertise compelling. Big Foot has at all times been eclectic: inside its grounds, a sacred shrine sits alongside a record-breaking sculpture, herb gardens, a chicken sanctuary, and even theme-park-style sights. Over the years it has drawn everybody from Bollywood stars to politicians–Pratibha Patil famously made a want right here earlier than her presidency–in addition to tour buses and the odd influencer. To keep related, it has embraced social media and even “I love Goa” selfie spots that Adriel himself calls gimmicky. Yet beneath the floor, extra significant work continues: youngsters’s artwork courses with NGOs, yoga periods, images contests, and cultural occasions that root it in the neighborhood. Plans for a restaurant and an AI-driven sonic tour level towards a extra dynamic future. It is that this combine, sacred and playful, historic and barely kitsch, that makes Big Foot distinctive. For aware travellers, it provides not simply diversion however context: an opportunity to glimpse the layers of perception, labour, and creativeness that form Goa past its seashores. In Loutolim, the place life nonetheless feels extra intact than elsewhere, the museum endures as a curious hybrid of previous and current.-Karina Acharya
Tickets: Adults-Rs150; Toddlers beneath 3-free
Timings: 10am-5pm; Monday-Sunday
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