Did you know... Is Goa a country? An island? Or what?

Goa used to be a minor port town on the west coast of South India. Its name derives from gopa, which means cowherd in Sanskrit; this was the name of the region in mediaeval India, though it may not have been named after cowherds, and the name might mean something quite different in a local language. Its significance rose when it was occupied in 1510 by the Portuguese, who quickly developed it into one of the main centres of Asian spice trade and missionary activity. After a brief bloom, Goa began to decline slowly in the 17th century.

The region of Goa remained in Portuguese hands after India attained independence from the British. Finally the Indian government occupied Goa in 1961 by a symbolic military move, but the colony was formally given up by Portugal only in 1974. Along with several other colonial ports, Goa had been a so-called Union Territory under central administration for quite a while, but in 1987 it was raised to the rank of a state (to which the geographically separate ports of Daman and Diu also belong).

Goa parties and Goa music is rooted in the hippie movement of the sixties. Hippies longing to get away from their oppressive cultures found just what they had wanted in the laid-back beaches of Goa, where you could sleep in the open air all year round (though you had better put a couple of palm leaves over some sticks as a roof in the rainy season), and where marijuana grew abundantly in the nearby mountains.

Today, the hippies - the few that continue to be hippies - have moved away to remoter places and Goa has been taken over by package tourists. There are scary prohibitive laws to cut down the popularity of smoking pot, and Goa music - now dominated by techno elements - is more often heard in the West than in Goa.

Source: just believe me :)

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