The Forts Nobody Photographs: North Goa Beyond Aguada and Chapora

Goa has two forts everybody visits and about a dozen it drives straight past. The two are Aguada, where the coach parties queue for the lighthouse, and Chapora, which most people know as the fort from Dil Chahta Hai and climb for the Instagram shot rather than the history. There is a wonderful moment on r/goatravel where someone posts a reel captioned your Goa trip is not complete until you visit this sea fort, and a local replies, deadpan, yes, all tourists please go there, Candolim, Baga, Calangute is the bestest. Someone else adds the correction that stings: the thing in the reel is not even a fort, it is a bastion of Aguada, the bit that stuck out into the sea. That is the state of fort tourism in Goa. The famous ones are half-understood and mobbed, and five genuinely good forts sit empty a short drive away.

I write for Refuje and I do not live in Goa, so the history below is looked up, not remembered, off Goa Tourism, INTACH and the heritage records, with the ground-level colour from Goans on r/Goa. Five forts, worth the detour, and each a different kind of thing: one restored so well you can walk right into it, three left as romantic ruins nobody tends, and one quietly turned into a hotel most Goans cannot afford to enter. Take a scooter, a bottle of water, and an afternoon you do not mind losing. Not one of them will be crowded.

The one you keep driving past: Reis Magos

If you have crossed the Mandovi bridge into Panjim, you have passed Reis Magos and probably not noticed it, a compact laterite fort on the north bank below the bright Reis Magos church. It is the oldest of the lot, built by the Portuguese in 1551 to guard the narrowest point at the rivers mouth, rebuilt in 1707, and then, in the way these things go, demoted: it became a prison and stayed one until 1993, after which it fell to rubble and weeds. What makes it worth your time is that somebody saved it. The Helen Hamlyn Trust, INTACH and the Goa government restored it and reopened it in 2012 as a heritage centre, which makes it the rare Goa fort you can actually walk into, with clean ramparts, galleries and a straight drop of a view over the river and the bridge. There is a lovely tell in one r/Goa thread: a regular admits they visit the area all the time but only in the evenings, and had never once had the urge to go inside. That is the fort in a sentence. Everyone passes it. Almost nobody goes in.

Practical, because this is the one with rules. Reis Magos opens Tuesday to Sunday and closes at 5pm, and there is a small entry ticket, in the region of fifty rupees when this was written, so it is the one fort here you cannot roll up to at sunset. Go in the late afternoon, leave time before it shuts, and if you want the view with a drink afterwards, a commenter points to Carlitos nearby for a sick view by day and good food. Confirm the timings and the ticket before you go; both drift.

The romantic ruins: Alorna, Corjuem, St Estevam

Now the ones nobody bothered to restore, which, for my money, make the better afternoon. Alorna sits up in the Pernem interior, forty-odd minutes past Mapusa, a 17th-century river fort the Bhonsles of Sawantwadi threw up on the bank of the Chapora to mark their line against the Portuguese; the Portuguese took it in 1746, renamed it Santa Cruz de Alorna, lost it, took it again. What is left is raw. A moat you can still trace, four bastions, laterite walls going green in the rains, and a bend in the river with nobody in it. No ticket, no guard, which is both the appeal and the reason it is quietly falling down. The Portuguese thought enough of the place to name a governor after it, the Marquis of Alorna. Today it is yours alone.

Corjuem is the one I would drive out for first. It is a small square fort on a river island near Aldona, reached over a bridge, built in 1705 by a Portuguese viceroy to hold the eastern edge of their territory against Maratha and Rajput raids, and it is one of only two inland laterite forts left in Goa. It briefly ran as a military school with four guns before being abandoned in 1834. It is tiny, you can walk the walls in fifteen minutes, but the setting does the work: red laterite ramparts, a grassy interior, and behind it the ochre plateaus of the Bicholim mining country. Free, quiet, and genuinely old. Then there is St Estevam, or Juve fort, on an island in the Mandovi that got its bridge only in the 1980s; the little fort on the hillock dates to 1668 and is now mostly a wall and a view, the sort of place a Goan on r/Goa noted people never realise is even there, in the same breath as being surprised Old Goa once had a 21-kilometre fortification wall. It is a sunset spot the beach crowd will never find.

The one that became a hotel: Tiracol

At the very top of Goa, across the Terekhol river from Querim, stands Fort Tiracol, and it comes with an asterisk. The Sawantwadi ruler Khem Sawant Bhonsle built it in the 17th century and called it Terekhol, steep river bank in Konkani; the Portuguese stormed it in 1746, put a church to St Anthony inside the walls, and held it until 1961, when it was among the last places to surrender at Liberation. Then the modern part. The state ran it as a small hotel from 1976, and in 2009 a private company took it over and turned it into a boutique heritage hotel. It is beautifully done. It is also, now, largely closed to you unless you are paying. That is exactly the complaint Goans make about it. On the thread where someone shared photos of Tiracol, a commenter wrote that once again Goans have been kept out of their own heritage, the room rates unaffordable to locals, and another put it flatly: almost the entire fort is now with the resort. You can still drive up, see the church and the ramparts from outside and take in the view down the river mouth, but the fort proper is somebody elses lobby now. Worth seeing, worth being a little angry about.

Once again, Goans have been kept out of their own heritage. The room rates are unaffordable to locals.

A fort with nobody in it is a strange, good feeling, and North Goa has five of them going spare. This runs alongside the other quiet-heritage corners this series keeps finding: the churches and ghost-lanes of Old Goa, the ferry-only calm of Divar island, and 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

A word on sources, because it matters. I write for Refuje and I do not live in Goa; none of this history is mine to remember, so I looked it up, off Goa Tourism, INTACH, Wikipedia and the heritage records. The living detail is the Redditors, not me. The habit of driving past Reis Magos without going in, the Carlitos tip, the plain anger over Tiracol going private; all quoted and attributed, reported rather than endorsed. Fees and hours drift, so treat the Reis Magos ticket as a rough guide and check before you travel. Every photo is the fort named in its caption. Checked August 2026.

• Reis Magos (1551, prison to 1993, INTACH and Helen Hamlyn Trust restoration, reopened 2012, Tuesday-to-Sunday hours and ticket): Goa Tourism, INTACH and heritage records.
• Corjuem (1705 laterite island fort, one of two surviving inland laterite forts), St Estevam / Juve fort (built 1668), and Alorna (17th-century Bhonsle river fort, taken by the Portuguese in 1746): Goa Tourism, Wikipedia and heritage references.
• Tiracol (Sawantwadi Bhonsle origin, 1746 Portuguese capture, church of St Anthony, private heritage hotel since 2009) and the local objection to being shut out, plus the Aguada-bastion correction, the pass-but-never-enter habit and the Carlitos tip: attributed r/Goa and r/goatravel threads, quoted inline.

Access, fees and ownership all shift, and a fort that is free and open today can be leased tomorrow, as Tiracol shows. Check current details before you go, and if you know these forts better than these sources do, tell us and we will fix it.