Things to Do in Kochi, area by area

Kochi's headline beach: a shallow, swimmable strip of golden sand on Vypin island with a backwater lagoon running behind it, close enough for a day trip and comfortable enough to base a week in.

Not a swimming beach but the best free evening in Kochi: a promenade of Chinese fishing nets, grilled seafood stalls and container ships sliding past close enough to read their names.

The everyday beach of Vypin island: working fishing shore, prawn ponds and a small beach park, twenty minutes from the city and almost entirely free of tourists.

Cherai's quiet neighbour: a wide, near-empty sweep of sand backed by casuarinas and low dunes, beloved of Malayalam film crews and almost nobody else.

The nearest real sea to Fort Kochi: an open beach at the harbour mouth with a climbable lighthouse that gives the best free-standing view of the whole Kochi coast.

Where the Periyar meets the sea at the northern tip of Vypin: a fishing harbour, a ferry to Azhikode and a beach that is about boats and estuary drama rather than bathing.

Kochi's signature silhouette: giant cantilevered nets worked by hand on the harbour shore, free to watch, and best seen with the low sun behind them.

The short-grain mutton biryani that Mattancherry queues for at noon and finishes by mid-afternoon, served in a plain tiled room that has not bothered to redecorate for the tourists.

A whole restaurant built around puttu, Kerala's steamed rice-and-coconut cylinder, reinvented in two dozen versions from beef and prawn to chocolate — and the easiest introduction to Kerala food for a nervous first-timer.

Kochi's classic special-occasion seafood room, built inside the hull of a kettuvallam rice barge on the tip of Willingdon Island, where you choose your fish by weight and watch container ships slide past the window.

The Fort Kochi breakfast institution since 1997 — filter coffee, a slab of chocolate cake and a small contemporary art gallery in the front room of an old Dutch-era house on Burgher Street.

A modest Kerala-style palace holding some of the finest surviving temple-style murals in India, including a Ramayana cycle painted across the walls of a royal bedchamber.

Built in 1568 and still standing at the end of an antique-shop lane: hand-painted Chinese floor tiles, Belgian chandeliers and the oldest active synagogue in the Commonwealth.

Fort Kochi's grandest interior and its most surprising: a pastel-and-gold Gothic revival basilica whose walls and ceiling carry frescoes by an Italian Jesuit painter.

The mainland's working shopping street — a kilometre of spice sacks, textile shops, gold showrooms, tailors and fruit carts where Ernakulam actually buys things, five minutes from the metro.

Four hundred metres of antique dealers, brass, colonial furniture, Kathakali masks and spice shops in Kochi's old Jewish quarter, ending at the whitewashed clock tower of the Paradesi Synagogue.

The working spice street that made Kochi rich — a kilometre of open godown doors where ginger, pepper, turmeric and copra are still weighed, sacked and loaded, five minutes from the tourist lane and a world away from it.