Colva Beach

This guide to Colva Beach in Goa traces the coconut palms lining the shore back to the 1700s, when landowner Sebastiao Jose Roiz ordered his villagers to plant them along the entire stretch of loose white sand. It follows the villagers' resistance, convinced the shifting sand could never hold a root, and how the trees took anyway, becoming a model copied along the coast. Walk beneath that green wall of palms and picture the argument that put every one of them there.