Why Fort Kochi is worth a day
Most people treat Kochi as the airport they fly into on the way to Munnar. That is a waste of the most interesting town in the state.
Fort Kochi has been Portuguese, Dutch and British in turn, and it still looks like all three at once. You can walk the whole thing in a morning, and the walk goes past a fifteenth-century church, a working synagogue, a palace with murals, and fishing gear that arrived from China six hundred years ago.
The Chinese fishing nets
These are the postcard, and they are better in person than in photographs because you can watch them work.
Each net is a cantilevered dip net on a fixed frame, worked by four or five men and a set of stone counterweights. They lower it, wait, and haul. It is slow, communal and mostly unchanged since it arrived — probably with traders from the court of Kublai Khan.
Go at dawn or in the hour before sunset. Midday is hot, flat light and no fishing.
The men will offer to let you help haul for a tip. It is a fair transaction and worth doing once.
St Francis Church
The oldest European church in India, built in 1503.
Vasco da Gama was buried here after he died in Kochi in 1524. His remains went back to Lisbon fourteen years later, but the gravestone is still in the floor and it is genuinely affecting to stand on.
Ten minutes. Free.
Mattancherry Palace
Built by the Portuguese as a gift to the Raja of Kochi, renovated by the Dutch, and known as the Dutch Palace ever since — which is unfair to the Portuguese.
The reason to go inside is the murals. Wall after wall of scenes from the Ramayana in dense, saturated vegetable pigment. They are among the finest in India and almost nobody photographs them, because photography is not allowed.
Closed Fridays. About forty-five minutes.
The Paradesi Synagogue and Jew Town
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Built in 1568, and one of the oldest active synagogues in the Commonwealth.
The floor is laid with hand-painted Chinese tiles, no two the same, brought in the eighteenth century. The Belgian chandeliers came later. The community that built it has almost entirely gone to Israel, and the handful of remaining members are elderly. There is something quiet and sad about the place that the guidebooks do not quite capture.
Closed Fridays and Saturdays. The street leading to it — Jew Town — is the best shopping in Kerala, full of antique dealers and spice merchants, and it still smells of ginger.
Kathakali, and how to watch it properly
Kathakali is the classical dance-drama of Kerala: enormous costumes, painted faces, and a vocabulary of eye and hand movements that takes years to learn.
Go an hour before the performance and watch the make-up being applied. Most theatres in Fort Kochi open the green room for exactly this. The application takes hours and is more interesting than the performance for a first-timer, because someone will explain what each colour means while it is being painted on.
The performances for visitors are shortened and narrated. That is the right way to see it the first time.
How long you need
Half a day covers the nets, St Francis, the palace and the synagogue at a brisk pace.
A full day lets you walk it properly, eat well, and see Kathakali in the evening. That is what we would recommend, and it is why our Kerala routes start with a night here rather than driving straight up to Munnar.
Practical notes
The old town is walkable and flat. Your car cannot follow you through the narrow streets — leave it and walk, which is the point.
Mattancherry Palace closes Friday. The synagogue closes Friday and Saturday. Plan around it, or you will do a long walk to two locked doors.
Ferries cross to Ernakulam constantly and cost almost nothing. It is a better crossing than the road bridge.