The Malabar House

Parade Road in Fort Kochi has a church on one side and The Malabar House on the other, and both have changed hands more than once. St Francis Church was built by the Portuguese and taken by the Dutch. The house was bought in 1755 by Jan Herman Clausing, a Dutchman, and went on to spice and tea traders, then bankers, before it became, in 1997, Fort Kochi's first boutique heritage hotel. It is two villas round a courtyard, tiled roofs on stone pillars, with a pool of four metres by eight under a pink frangipani: good for a few strokes and a turn. The rooms differ, as rooms will in an old house, and the antiques and art in them come from Kerala's long traffic between East and West. In one, carved wooden pillars stand against a red wall, facing a dark four-poster. Ask for one of the five Roof Garden Suites upstairs, which have terraces of their own over the patio garden or the Parade Ground.

Recommended for anyone seeing Fort Kochi on foot who wants a courtyard and a pool to come back to, and for parents of one child, which is as many as a room will take, with babysitting on notice. The bicycles are free. A tuk-tuk does the longer run, to the synagogue and the Dutch Palace in Jew Town and Mattancherry, and the hotel's houseboat goes further, out onto Vembanad Lake. Dinner is back in the courtyard, at Malabar Junction: Keralan cooking given a Mediterranean turn and, some nights, Carnatic or Hindustani music or dance on the patio stage. Across the road, St Francis Church buried Vasco da Gama in 1524 and later sent his remains on to Lisbon. It kept the gravestone, which was there long before the Dutchman.