Vengurla is a small coastal town at the far southern tip of Maharashtra's Konkan coast, right on the border with Goa. It sees almost no foreign tourists and not many domestic ones either — which is part of the charm. The beaches are long, clean, and empty; the backdrop is a semicircle of low hills covered in cashew, mango, and coconut plantations; and the town itself is a sleepy grid of temples, an old port, and a lighthouse on a cliff with a view back over the whole bay.
The beaches are the main reason to come: Sagareshwar, three kilometres from town, is the most visited — a wide sweep of pale sand backed by casuarina trees with a small Shiva temple at one end, rarely crowded, and spectacular at sunset — while Mochemad Beach to the north has a quieter, more local character. The lighthouse on the headland above the jetty is worth the climb for the view north toward the Vengurla Rocks (the Burnt Islands) and south down the palm-fringed shoreline toward Goa. The Fruit Research Centre on the main road into town runs experiments on mango and cashew varieties — the Sindhu mango was bred here — and a nearby cashew factory will show you the roasting and processing if you ask.
Vengurla is cashew country, and the local sweet shops sell khaja, a crisp jaggery-based sweet that is a regional speciality. The surrounding area is packed with temples: the Rameshwar temple in town, Shri Vetoba at Aaravali (whose enormous idol is considered protective of seafarers), and the Ganesh temple at Redi, where the idol was found buried in an iron mine.
It is a long journey here — roughly ten hours by road from Mumbai, or fly to Goa and drive two and a half hours north. The payoff is a stretch of Konkan coast that still looks the way Goa did forty years ago.