Twenty years ago Cavelossim Beach was an idyllic place. Walking along the 10km stretch of sand, you were unlikely to meet anybody - except perhaps the odd fisherman or traveller bobbing lazily in the surf.
This changed in 1987 when the first charter flight from Britain touched down at Dabolim airport. Since then Goa has undergone a profound and unsubtle transformation. At Cavelos sim, in once-deserted South Goa, the five-star developers moved in. They bulldozed the ancient sand dunes, sank illegal tube wells into the ground, and constructed a nine-hole golf course. They built a preposterous artificial lagoon.
The villagers who for generations had relied on local wells for clean drinking water discovered to their horror that it now tasted of salt. More and more charter flights, meanwhile, took off from London and Man chester. By the mid-90s the sand dunes that had formed a natural barrier against the angry monsoon storms had completely vanished.
'The area has been irreparably damaged,' Norma Alvares of the Goa Foundation, the former colony's leading environmental group, said. 'The hotels have destroyed the clean water reservoir and the locals are now dependent on water brought in by tanker.'
Across the rest of Goa, the same story is being re peated. At Calangute and Baga, once inhabited by only a handful of hippies in huts, the beach is now crammed with hotels. This is largely our fault. Of the 17 charter flights that arrive in Goa every week from October to March, 13 are full of British holidaymakers.
'The British are very well behaved. We hardly have any problems with them' S.V. Balaram, of Goa's tourism association, said. It was the Portuguese who colonised Goa back in the 16th century. But it is the British who come here now. Sixty per cent of Goa's 210,000 visitors last year were from Britain.
Few foreign tourists, though, seem to give the environment much thought. 'North Goa's beaches are dirty and too crowded. There is too much plastic,' Mr Balaram admitted. 'Some tourists are lazy and ignorant. They just think: 'This is India. We don't care.' Having turned a blind eye to illegal development for most of the last decade, the local authorities are now trying to come up with a plan. They want to prevent more construction and encourage tourists into Goa's tropical interior. There is no doubt that some people have got rich from foreign visitors in Goa. The economy is now overwhelmingly dependent on tourism. And enterprising villagers have made money by renting out their spare rooms to backpackers.
But now there are too many rooms for too few tourists. With profit margins squeezed, hotels are not bothering, for example, to recycle the thousands of bottles of mineral water left behind. The locals are looking forward to the monsoon, when the tourists go home. 'In the season the hotels buy up all the fish. Consequently there is over-fishing. The only time Goans get to eat fish is when the rains come,' Mrs Alvares said.
