Across the Mandovi, a portal opens to Goa’s vanished past

There is a time travel portal in north Goa’s Betim village. Happily, accessing it does not require bending the laws of physics, merely following the rules of traffic. Tucked into a residential cluster off Betim’s main road, the portal takes the form of an unassuming white house. Inside, antique furniture gleams in the light streaming in from the double doors to a wraparound terrace overlooking River Mandovi. The walls in all the rooms are appointed with rows of uniformly framed visuals, a few cartographic but most photographic – black-and-white, sepia and matte saturated colour. These are the evocative, old-world interiors of Ferry Cross Museotel, a museum-cum-hotel opened in 2025. The 300 images lining the walls span scenes from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, capturing life in Betim and across the river in Panjim, just before Portuguese Goa officially became part of India.

On view is a dense visual mosaic of trans-Mandovi history, without any rigid chronological principle. The oldest image at Ferry Cross Museotel is an 1865 photograph of the Adil Shah Palace, converted into Goa’s Secretariat Building by the Portuguese. The most recent is a picture from 1960 of a statue of Goa’s first Portuguese duke in the 16th...

Read more

News