Kahani Paradise

Kahani earned a place on The Telegraph's Top 50 Hotels in the World list for 2024, a startling honour for a house with just eight rooms hidden behind a beach with no road to it. The estate fills twenty acres of gardens in a valley behind Paradise Beach on the Gokarna Peninsula in Karnataka, land that grew coconut, rice and betel nut for generations and was known locally as the paradise behind paradise. In 2006 a family from abroad became its guardians, and the hotel that grew out of that gamble is unlike anything else on this coast.

Eight rooms, twenty acres

Every room is different. The 940 sq ft Queen Suite, reached by its own private road through the gardens, has a bath hewn from a single piece of marble; the King Suite above the main villa keeps a long balcony over the pool to the Arabian Sea. The Peacock and Elephant suites share the Garden Pavilion, handy for families, while the main villa displays the Bellm family's antiques, from a rare Naga table to a pair of full-size wooden horses from Rajasthan. Outside are a free-form infinity pool clad in emerald lava stone, a full-size tennis court in its own clearing in the gardens, ringed by palm trees, a cricket pitch and a nine-foot-screen home cinema.

The beach itself is a six-minute walk down the hillside: a road-less, rocky cove of golden sand fringed by coconut groves.

Konkani cooking and candlelit stepwells

The kitchen leans on what the local boats land, from XXL tiger prawns and mud crabs to Aghanashini estuary mussels and wild oysters. Cooking classes cover Konkani coastal cuisine, and can start with foraging for fresh ingredients on the estate itself; the signature evening is dinner beside the geometric stepwell, lit by a thousand candles with flute and tabla players. Goa's Dabolim airport is about three hours away, which is exactly far enough to keep this valley the secret it has always been.