Sleeping in a Fort? Fort Aguada in Goa, India

You may have noticed that the hotel I stayed at in Goa had the name Fort Aguada in it and wondered why. I certainly did. There was a small rampart that stuck out from the hotel grounds and if you looked at the aerial shots of the hotel, it looked as though the hotel sat inside the fort grounds.

After I arrived, I realized that this was not the main Fort Aguada in Goa. The larger fort was about 3 kilometers up the road from the hotel. The rampart sitting outside the hotel was the “lower” fort. Fort Aguada Goa in Goa was built in 1613 by the Portuguese. It has a natural spring inside the fort and this is how it got its name, as Aguada means water in Portuguese.

Why should you visit you ask?

1. It’s Free! – It costs nothing to enter the site. You will have to pay a taxi to get you there, but otherwise it costs nothing to see Fort Aguada in Goa.
2. The View – The views of the Arabian Sea from the hilltop Fort Aguada is located are on are amazing and you can see why they choose this location.
3. There is a Lighthouse – I love lighthouses, but it is something I think of as being a North American and European thing, not an Indian thing. It was built after the fort in 1864. So think about that for a minute, the U.S. was fighting a civil war and Charing Cross Station opened in London during 1864.
4. A Prison – While doing some post-visit research, I found out there is now a prison on site fashioned out of the fort jail. Now I am kicking myself that I didn’t do more research on this before going because I totally missed it!

Have you ever been to a cool fort? Tell us where in the comments!