Margao is the commercial capital of South Goa and is the kind of Indian city that travel writing tends to ignore: working, unfussy, built for the people who live in it. The market is extraordinary. It runs every day and deals in fresh fish, local vegetables, spices, textiles, and everything else the surrounding villages need. The fish market section in the morning, with the day's catch from the fishing villages to the west, is worth the drive from wherever you are staying.
The villages around Margao are where South Goa's Catholic heritage concentrates in its most domestic form. Loutolim, Chandor, Quepem: the houses here are the old Goan mansions that the Catholic families of Portuguese Goa built over three centuries. Some are open for visits. The architecture is a hybrid of European and tropical forms, the interiors a mixture of Portuguese furniture and Goan craft, and the families who maintain them are usually there to talk about the history if you ask.
Colva and Benaulim, the beach villages west of Margao, are long beaches used primarily by the Goan population rather than the tourist economy. The infrastructure is simpler and the beaches are less photographed and the experience is closer to what Goa's coast was like before the shack economy took hold.
Travellers who want to understand Goa as a culture rather than as a resort destination. People interested in the Portuguese-Catholic heritage of the south in its living context. Food people who want to eat Goan food as the Goan population eats it: at the market, at family-run restaurants in the interior villages. Anyone who has been to Goa before and is looking for the part that most visitors miss.
Not the right base for beach-first visitors or anyone who needs the infrastructure of the tourist strips. Margao and the interior are day-trip material from Palolem or Agonda, or an entirely different kind of Goa trip for people who have decided the beach is secondary.
The Margao municipal market in the morning, specifically the fish section before nine. The Saturday market at Margao for produce and textiles used by the surrounding communities rather than staged for visitors. Fernando's Nostalgia in Raia village for the Goan lunch that is the most genuinely local restaurant experience in the south: no menu on the tourist circuit, no advertising, the cooking done by the same family for thirty years. The Menezes Braganza House in Chandor, one of the finest heritage houses in Goa, open by appointment with the family who still live in it. Benaulim Beach on a weekday afternoon for the low-season version of South Goa's coast.