Mormugao is one of the finest natural harbours on India’s west coast. Its eponymous district is unique in the small state
of Goa, yet rarely given the attention it deserves. “With Goa's primary port, first
railway and airport, Mormugao continues to be unlike the rest of the state,” writes Fr Nascimento J Mascarenhas in Mormugao’s Rich Heritage (self published at Vasco da Gama, Goa, India, February 2006). The 200-page volume outlines the history of Mormugao during the last five centuries. The oldest extant building in the area is Saint Andrew’s Church. The book focuses on this church and its ever-changing parish, without isolating them either from the people of other faiths or from the notable events of Goa’s secular history. In addition to carefully cited writings, the author relies on his own extensive walks through the area and interviews with all manner of people.
Jesuit priests established Christianity in Mormugao and inaugurated Saint Andrew’s Church on 5 April 1570. The following year the army of Adil Shah of Bijapur invaded South Goa and destroyed its churches. Mormugao’s priests and many people ran away but returned. Worship continued beneath a thatch of palm leaves, until they built a new church in 1594. This is the structure we now see. Pietro della Valle, an Italian traveller who visited it in 1624, described it as “magnificent, compared with others not only in this region, but even in the proper City of Rome.”
1624 was also the year in which the Portuguese began to build a fort overlooking the harbour. The fort square or praça of Mormugao extended 1,980 metres in length from the eastern limit, at the bulwark of Desterro, till the bulwark of Malabar in the west. It was 1,210 metres wide. During the latter half of the seventeenth
century, when unsanitary conditions made the grand City of Goa (now Old Goa) almost uninhabitable, the viceroy planned to shift the capital of the Portuguese dominions in India to Mormugao. A palace and other buildings came up within the fort. Panjim, however, was subsequently found more suitable for a new capital city, which it has remained.
In the nineteenth century, a British company won the contract to modernise the port and to lay a railway line from Mormugao to Goa’s frontier at Castle Rock and from there to the town of Hubli in British India. The port and the first section of the railway were opened to the public in July 1886. In the early years of the twentieth century, the city of Vasco da Gama was planned and built, a city of traders, railway officials and migrant labourers, yet graceful. In 1930, the Marão – a DH80A Puss Moth piloted by Moreira Cardoso and Sarmento Pimentel – was the first plane to land in Goa. That airstrip on the Mormugao plateau is no longer used, but when tourists from all over the world land at Dabolim Airport, their first glimpse of Goa is Mormugao.