Almost everything a visitor wants in Kochi is in Fort Cochin, a small peninsula of Dutch, Portuguese and British trading houses at the harbour mouth. Six of our seven stays here are inside it, and they are old buildings with documented histories rather than hotels built to look old.
Fort Cochin is walkable end to end in half an hour. The Malabar House occupies a 1755 Dutch trading house opposite St Francis Church, with 17 rooms and a courtyard pool. Old Harbour Hotel is a 300-year-old Dutch-Portuguese mansion with 13 rooms, garden cottages and a pool. The Old Courtyard has nine antique-furnished rooms in a 200-year-old Portuguese mansion. Kara is eight rooms in a building that served as a Portuguese silver mint and then Dutch East India Company property. Dutch Bungalow dates to 1668 and has been privately owned by the same family since 1874.
That density is the point: the Chinese fishing nets, the synagogue and spice lanes of Mattancherry, the Kathakali theatres and the cafés are all within a walk, and you can leave the car alone for two days.
Off the peninsula, Tea Bungalow is a 1912 coir trader's bungalow on the mainland that later served as Brooke Bond's Kochi headquarters, now a garden hotel. Cranganor sits further out on the Periyar river, looking across to the water.
Kochi's international airport is about 40 km north of Fort Cochin, an hour or so by road, and there is a passenger ferry between Fort Cochin and Ernakulam that beats the traffic. Alleppey and the backwaters are around 55 km south, close enough that most people do Kochi first and the houseboats after.
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