The Caves Before the Beaches: Ancient Rock-Cut Goa

Goa sells its history in one flavour, Portuguese: the churches of Old Goa, the whitewashed villas, four and a half centuries of Estado da India. That is real, and it is barely half the story. Cut into the laterite hills of the interior, an hour inland from the beaches, are caves that were old before a single Portuguese ship arrived, some of them fifteen hundred years old, carved by hand into solid rock as shrines and shelters. Almost nobody visits them. There is a thread on r/Goa where a traveller asks for places with a real historic feel that are totally unheard of, and a local reels off a list, a Jain temple ruin here, roadside stones there, rock-cut caves on a highway that are, in his word, completely neglected. That neglect is exactly why they are worth your morning.

I write for Refuje and I do not live in Goa, so the archaeology here is sourced, from the Archaeological Survey, heritage records and the Goan press, with the on-the-ground feel drawn from Goans on r/Goa who have actually gone looking. This is a guide to the oldest human-made things you can still stand inside in North Goa: three sets of rock-cut caves in the Bicholim and Ponda interior, and a note on the even older marks their ancestors left further out. Take a scooter and a sense of the improbable. You will likely be the only visitor there.

Start at Arvalem

If you do only one, do Arvalem. Near Sanquelim in Bicholim, also called the Pandava caves, and a genuinely strange thing to find in this state. Most rock-cut caves in India were hacked out of hard basalt; these were cut into soft red laterite, the crumbly stone the whole coast is built on, which almost nobody attempts because it will not hold a clean edge. Date them to the 5th to 7th century and they are older than a lot of what gets called ancient India. Six chambers in a row. Five held shrines, the sixth was probably a kitchen or a store; Shiva lingas sit in them now, so the place reads as Hindu. Then again, a large Buddha statue turned up nearby, and the bare monk-cell plainness of the rooms argues the other way: Buddhists first, a Hindu temple grafted on centuries later. And local legend, of course, gives the whole site to the Pandava brothers of the Mahabharata, waiting out their exile. History and myth, one address.

The other reason to start here is that Arvalem comes with a day built around it. Walk a few minutes from the caves and you reach the Arvalem waterfall, a single clean drop into a green pool that roars in the monsoon and thins to a trickle by April; above it stands the old Rudreshwar temple. Caves, a waterfall and a working shrine inside one small loop, and on most mornings nobody in any of them. Go early, before the light goes flat and the heat gets silly, wear something with grip for the laterite, and give the caves ten quiet minutes before you go chasing the water. They are fifteen hundred years old. They can have ten minutes.

For the keen: Lamgao and Khandepar

Two more sets of caves reward anyone who catches the bug. Lamgao, about four kilometres from Bicholim town, has two rock-cut caves at the foot of a hill that mining has chewed at over the years, which is its own sad Goan story. The first cave has a two-pillared front and an antechamber, with a linga inside that the late archaeologist V R Mitragotri dated to around 800 CE; the second is unmistakably Buddhist in plan, a flat-roofed rectangle held up by four squat laterite pillars. Then there is Khandepar, tucked in forest near Ponda behind the Mandovi, four small laterite caves that are among the oldest built things left in Goa and were, astonishingly, only rediscovered in 1970. Each is a pair of plain cells; the Kadamba dynasty later added tiered roofs and turned them to Hindu use around the 10th and 11th centuries, though one cave keeps a meditation pedestal that argues for Buddhist monks first. None of these are grand. They are small, quiet, and cut by hand out of the same red rock the whole state is built on, and standing in one is the closest you will get in Goa to touching the pre-Portuguese past.

Most temples in Goa are ancient. They survived. Each one tells a tale.

The even older layer

If the caves are old, the marks under them are ancient. Scattered across the Konkan, including Goa, are petroglyphs, images pecked into flat laterite by people thousands of years ago, long before any temple or cave. There is a good r/Goa thread where someone shares Goas rock carvings and the comments light up: a note that the same carvings run up the coast into Ratnagiri in Maharashtra, that some seem to show animals no longer found here, even, one commenter swears, a creature that looks more like a mammoth than an elephant. It is the oldest human signature in the region, and it reframes the whole place. Honesty, though: the best and most accessible of these carving sites, and the well-known rock-cut caves at Rivona, are down in the south of Goa, in Sanguem, not the north. Chase them if the bug bites hard. For a North Goa day, the three caves above are your layer of deep time, and they are plenty.

Standing in a fifteen-hundred-year-old room cut out of the same red rock the beaches sit on is a quiet kind of thrill, and it belongs to the Goa this series keeps chasing. It sits on the same laterite that shapes the state's plateaus and sadas, alongside the later, grander heritage of Old Goa, and it is part of the wider case for the Goa beyond the beaches. You can see the North Goa experiences that are currently bookable on the North Goa things-to-do page.

Common questions

Sources and a note on this guide

I write for Refuje and I do not live in Goa, and I have not crawled through all of these caves myself. The archaeology, the dates for Arvalem, Lamgao and Khandepar, the laterite rock-cut technique, the Buddhist-then-Hindu histories and the Kadamba and Bhoja links, comes from the Archaeological Survey, heritage encyclopaedias, the Goan press and travel references. The feel of the places, the sense that they are neglected and the pleasure of finding them, comes from Goans on r/Goa and r/goatravel, quoted and attributed, and reported rather than endorsed. Where I have said something is in the south rather than the north, that is deliberate, so you do not drive to Bicholim expecting Sanguem. Access changes, especially around Lamgao where mining has reshaped the ground, so check before a long detour. The facts were checked in August 2026.

• Arvalem (Pandava) Caves, 5th-7th century, laterite rock-cut, six chambers, Shiva lingas and Buddhist origin, plus the waterfall and Rudreshwar temple: Archaeological Survey, Wikipedia and Goan heritage references.
• Lamgao caves (6th-7th century, Bhoja period, Buddhist second cave, linga dated c. 800 CE) and Khandepar caves (near Ponda, four laterite caves, rediscovered 1970, adapted by the Kadambas): heritage records, the Goan press and travel references.
• The neglected-heritage framing, the ancient-temples point and the Konkan petroglyphs (including the animal carvings): attributed r/Goa and r/goatravel threads, quoted inline.

Old sites can be fenced off, damaged or simply hard to find, and inland Goa changes with mining and roads, so confirm access before you travel. If you know these caves and their history better than these sources do, tell us and we will make this more accurate.