Category: Kozhikode (Calicut), Kerala

Kozhikode is Kerala’s most historically significant city — the ancient port where Vasco da Gama landed in 1498, the capital of the Zamorin dynasty, and the origin of calico cotton that gave cloth its English name. Today it is a city of extraordinary food, the Malabar culinary tradition at its most complete, the famous Kozhikode halwa and biryani and beach fish fry, and a culture shaped by centuries of Arab, Persian, and Portuguese trade. The beaches, the historic fishing harbour at Beypore, the Western Ghats rising behind — Kozhikode is Kerala before it became a tourist cliché, still entirely itself.