Ever since my move to Goa a few years ago, I have haunted abandoned houses and museums and pored over literature in an attempt to understand my new home. The Museum of Christian Art (MoCA) in Velha, North Goa, with its confluence of cultures, was high on this list. But it was inaccessible — closed for renovation since 2017. So, when it reopened in May, visitors like me were quick to take the ferry from Salim Ali National Park to a jetty in Old Goa to spend an afternoon there.
The 17th century Convent of Santa Monica (within which is housed the MoCA) sits neatly in a depression amidst the hills, its large buttresses reaching out like a hand. The few remaining laterite walls of the nearby St Augustine Monastery ruins cast shifting shadows over it. You walk along the austere building to a little door at the far end of the wall, visible only because of the large brass name plate.
