Alibaug

Alibag sits on the far side of Mumbai harbour, close enough that on a clear evening you can see the city's towers from its beaches and far enough that it feels like another century. For most of the eighteenth century this was the seat of the Angres, the Maratha admirals who ran the Konkan coast and taxed English and Portuguese shipping alike. Kanhoji Angre's base, Kolaba Fort, still stands a few hundred metres off the town beach.

The town's name is said to come from Ali, a Bene Israeli landowner whose coconut and mango gardens once lined this shore. The gardens are still the shape of the place: low houses behind walls of coconut palm, quiet lanes running down to the sand, and weekend villas for people who would rather cross the water than fly to Goa.

Down the coast the forts get older and stranger. Korlai, built by the Portuguese in the 1590s, guards a village where some families still speak a Portuguese-based creole four centuries on. Further south, Murud-Janjira rises straight out of the sea — the island fortress of the Siddis, which Marathas, Portuguese and British all tried and failed to take. You reach it the old way, by sailboat from Rajpuri jetty.

This is Koli country, and the food follows the boats. Bombil fry, crisp outside and almost liquid within; surmai and pomfret in a red masala; prawn rice; and sol kadhi, the pink kokum-and-coconut drink that ends every meal. Kombdi vade — chicken curry with puffed fried bread — is the Sunday dish. In August, at Narali Purnima, fishing families offer coconuts to the sea to open the season.

Check the tide table before anything else — Kolaba Fort is a walk across wet sand at low tide and a boat ride, or nothing, at high. Start for Janjira early; the sailboats queue by late morning and the fort is all steps and sun. On weekends leave Mumbai on Friday night or Saturday at dawn, because the return ferries on Sunday evening fill up. And eat where the drivers eat: the fish is the same, the bill is half.

Kihim and Nagaon are working beaches as much as leisure ones — fishing boats, nets, drying bombil on bamboo racks — so give the catch and the people sorting it room. Keep vehicles off the sand. The sea forts are protected monuments with fragile walls; stay off the ramparts' edges and take your bottles back across the water with you.

From here the Konkan coast keeps going south, through Murud and the fishing towns of Ratnagiri, all the way to Goa. South Goa answers the same instinct for a slow beach with more time and fewer people than the north.