Diu

Diu is an island at the southern tip of Saurashtra, joined to the mainland by two bridges and to India by a strange history. The Portuguese built the fort here in 1535 after a treaty with Sultan Bahadur Shah of Gujarat, held the place for 426 years and left only in December 1961. What remains is a town of whitewashed churches, blue-shuttered houses, Portuguese street names and a sea fort whose cannons still point at nothing.

It is also, crucially, not Gujarat for the purposes of prohibition, which is why the bars are busy. The island is small enough to circle on a scooter in a morning. Nagoa is the main beach, a long horseshoe fringed with hoka trees, a doum palm found nowhere else in India; Ghoghla on the mainland side is wider and better for swimming; Gomtimata on the west is empty and rough.

St Paul's Church of 1610 still holds Mass under a Baroque facade carved by Gujarati woodworkers, while St Thomas has become a small museum of stone saints. At the western end, the Naida Caves are a quarry the Portuguese cut for fort stone, now a maze of pillars and shafts of light. Eat kingfish grilled at a shack, watch the sun drop behind Panikotha, the little island prison in the channel, and go slowly.