8 Places to Visit in Kochi

On Vypeen Island, Chinese fishing nets — cantilever contraptions of teak poles and river stones introduced by traders from the court of Kublai Khan in the thirteenth or fourteenth century — still haul fish from the estuary at dawn, the counterweights swinging with a mechanical patience that feels pre-industrial even when a container ship slides past in the background. A ten-minute ferry ride away, the glass towers of Ernakulam's central business district flash with the reflected light of a city that has decided, fairly definitively, to become modern.

The Fort Kochi peninsula is where most visitors anchor themselves, and for good reason. The streets here are a compressed architectural record of every power that found this harbour worth controlling: the Portuguese arrived in 1500 and built St. Francis Church — the oldest European-built church in India — from laterite stone. The Dutch seized the fort in 1663, whitewashed the church and renamed it, and built the Mattancherry Palace with its extraordinary cycle of Hindu murals as a gift to the Kochi raja whose cooperation they required. The British arrived in 1795 and renamed everything again, leaving the most durable administrative infrastructure of the three. Mattancherry, running south from Fort Kochi's tip, preserves the Jew Town quarter where the sixteenth-century Paradesi Synagogue still functions, its floor tiled with hand-painted Chinese willow-pattern porcelain tiles, each one slightly different.

The contemporary art scene here is disproportionate to the city's size. The Kochi-Muziris Biennale, held every two years from December through March in the Fort Kochi warehouses and the Aspinwall House grounds, has become one of Asia's most significant art events — a fact that surprises visitors who arrive expecting only heritage and backwaters. Auto-rickshaw fares within Fort Kochi are rarely worth negotiating below ₹50 for short distances; Ola and Uber operate throughout Ernakulam proper but are less reliable on the peninsulas. The inter-island ferries, operated by KSWTD, run on fixed government fares between ₹5 and ₹15 and are both the cheapest and the most pleasurable way to move between Ernakulam, Fort Kochi, Mattancherry, and Vypeen.