Ask most travellers to name an Indian beach holiday, and you’ll probably get one answer: Goa. For overseas visitors, it has become shorthand for an Indian coastal escape, with its palm-fringed beaches, shacks serving fresh seafood, Portuguese-era churches and wild parties that carry on after dark. But I live in India, and I know that this familiar picture represents just a fraction of what the country’s coastline has to offer.
Stretching for nearly 7,000 miles along the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean, it encompasses beaches and coastal landscapes that vary dramatically from one region to the next – and it’s about time some of them got a mention too.
Here are some alternatives to Goa for your Indian beach break, whether you’re after surfing, diving or wildlife-spotting.
open image in galleryThe surf coast
Mulki, Karnataka
India’s surfing scene is young – it only took root in the early 2000s – and began on the west coast in Karnataka, where the tiny fishing village of Mulki became the country’s improbable surf capital. An American surfer, Jack Hebner opened India’s first surf school here in 2004 on a stretch of coast nobody had thought to ride before. The waves themselves are a short boat ride downriver at Sasihithlu, where the Shambhavi meets the Arabian Sea in gentle swells.
How to do it: Locals call Hebner the “surfing swami,” and his school, Mantra Surf Club, sits on the calm side of the Shambhavi River. It runs three to 30-day courses with ISA-certified instructors, gear and yoga thrown in, alongside riverside rooms – shared air-conditioned dorms from around £14 a night per person; premium cottages from £45.
Puducherry
Puducherry, further south again, has some of the country’s more forgiving waves at Serenity Beach, well suited to beginners and improvers alike. Two piers built as tsunami defences after 2004 helped shape the break and since the town never quite caught on as a surfing destination, you ride it without the crowds.
How to do it: Kallialay, one of the east coast’s original surf schools, founded in 2009 by two Spanish brothers, still runs ISA-certified group and private lessons here, with all the equipment included. For the night, Le Dupleix, an 18th-century French colonial heritage hotel in White Town, does doubles from around £69.
Kovalam, Tamil Nadu
Along India’s east coast, Tamil Nadu has carved out its own corner of the country’s surf scene. An hour south of Chennai, Kovalam – known locally as Covelong – mixes mellow cove waves for beginners with firmer point breaks for more confident surfers, best between August and March. Around 12 miles on, the historic coastal town of Mamallapuram brings surfing right up against one of India’s most recognisable monuments: right-handers peel past the eighth-century Shore Temple, built by the Pallava rulers who made the town a major centre of art and architecture.
How to do it: Surf Turf has taught Kovalam since 2012, with a surf shop, ocean-facing rooms and a bar that looks straight over the break. Doubles from around £49. The same outfit also runs kayaking and stand-up paddleboarding.
open image in galleryBeneath the waves
The Andaman Islands
Compared with Thailand, Indonesia or the Philippines, India’s diving scene is still nascent. Most of it plays out across two archipelagos. The Andamans, fringed with immaculate beaches and threaded with mangrove creeks, are the more accessible of the two, while Lakshadweep sits further out and harder to reach.
Andaman diving is based mainly on Swaraj Dweep (formerly Havelock Island), home to more than 25 dive sites. Minerva Ledge remains one of the most popular: flat coral gardens giving way to deeper water thick with tuna and barracuda, the current strong enough for a proper drift dive. For a tougher dive, Dixon’s Pinnacle drops from 18 to 35 metres across three coral-draped ridges, patrolled by giant groupers and reef sharks, with the occasional manta or whale shark passing through.
A direct ferry covers the short hop to quieter Neil Island, renamed Shaheed Dweep, where Fish Slate is the one worth knowing. It’s a shallow reef of just four metres, where dugongs (a type of sea cow) graze the seagrass between February and May.
How to do it: DIVEIndia has been teaching people to dive here since the early 2000s – an SSI-affiliated Diamond-rated Instructor Training Centre, and one of the oldest outfits in the islands, running everything from a first try-dive to full certification.
open image in galleryLakshadweep
For divers willing to make the extra journey, Lakshadweep rewards the effort: a scatter of coral atolls off Kerala, with visibility stretching to 50 metres and turtles turning up on almost every outing. Diving is based around Kavaratti, Kadmat and Agatti islands. The best-known site, Wall of Wonder on Kavaratti’s north-west side, is a cave dive along a sheer reef face dropping to 20-30 metres, best explored after dark, when the water sparks with bioluminescence at every kick of a fin.
How to do it: Stay at Sea Shells, with a private beach on both Kavaratti (seaview cottages from around £70) and Agatti (ocean-view cottages from around £93, breakfast included). All visitors need a permit, applied for online via the ePermit portal.
Wildlife-spotting
Odisha
In Odisha, on India’s eastern coast, the beach itself becomes the attraction: hundreds of thousands of female olive ridley turtles come ashore together over just a handful of nights each year, typically between late January and March, in a mass event called an arribada, or “arrival”.
Gahirmatha, near the mouth of the Brahmani-Baitarani river in the state’s north, was the first such rookery to be recorded, in 1974, and was formally protected as a marine sanctuary in 1997, but access to the core nesting beach is now heavily restricted.
Rushikulya, further south near Chilika Lake, is the better bet – one of the most accessible places in India to see it, though numbers swing wildly: nearly 900,000 turtles nested there across two phases in 2025, compared to just 205,000 over four days in 2026.
How to do it: Bed down at Swosti Chilika Resort, on Asia’s largest brackish-water lagoon, less than an hour from Rushikulya; it arranges trips to see the nesting, and rooms cost from around £44 a night.
open image in galleryThe Andamans
After dark, India’s coast puts on a different kind of show: bioluminescence, the glow produced when disturbed marine plankton emit light through a chemical reaction. In the Andamans, Havelock Island’s mangrove channels, thick with these organisms, flare electric blue with every paddle stroke – one of the country’s most striking natural light shows.
Kayak tours run through operators on the island, though rules on night paddling in the mangroves are tightening, so check current timings; some trips now run before sunrise instead. Aim for a moonless night, since even faint moonlight washes out the glow.
How to do it: Rest up at Barefoot at Havelock, the island’s original eco-resort off Radhanagar Beach, its cottages built from mud, wood and thatch. From around £124 a night for two, breakfast included.
Mattu Beach, Karnataka
Mattu Beach, near Udupi in Karnataka, offers a quieter version of the same show: nutrient-rich coastal waters here support their own bloom of bioluminescent plankton, lighting up the surf whenever waves break on the shore. It is most reliable on dark, moonless nights in the weeks following the monsoon.
How to do it: Stay at the Samanvay Boutique Hotel, a short drive inland, from around £37 a night.