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To hear the guidebooks tell it, Goa, a small western territory along the Arabian Sea, is the Ibiza of India and not much more, with little in the way of lodging beyond its beach shacks and five-star fortresses. I did not know what I was after when I began looking into Goa, but I knew I had found it when I arrived at the website for Siolim House. Situated in a quiet village a few miles west of Mapusa, the hub of north Goa, Siolim House is a 350-year-old Hindu-Portuguese manor that has been painstakingly restored and converted into a hotel by its owner, Varun Sood, a Goan businessman with a passion for his state's old colonial homes.

Over a few rainy nights in the Macao Suite - a decadently proportioned room with a four-poster bed, polished wood floors and exquisite Indian rugs - I learned that Siolim House is one of the modest but growing number of such inns, elegant yet laid-back guesthouses where visitors can take in not only Goa's distinctive Indo-Latin architecture and cooking, but also a culturally rich, less techno-centric way of life.

People in Goa will tell you that the province is "India for Beginners" or "India Light." The point seems to be that what you are seeing is not the real India but some sort of hybrid, imbued with a Latin influence from more than four centuries of Portuguese, not British, rule, which ended relatively late, in 1961. Locals tend to refer to themselves and one another as "Goan" and to their other countrymen as "Indian", implying that there is more than just a minor distinction. To the foreign eye, the differences are more apparent in the buildings and food. This is the only part of India where pork sausage is as much a menu staple as masala, and certain neighbourhoods are so filled with Moorish tilework that if you squint, it could be Lisbon. The Portuguese left their mark on the language, too. Old homes are often referred to as "casas," and the Portuguese word for tranquil, sossegado, has become susegad, the Goan word for their relaxed, easygoing approach to life and hospitality.

Over three centuries, the Goan gentry, many of them descendants of the Portuguese, built all over the state. A range of architectural styles evolved, but the purest examples of the Goan aesthetic share a few features: brightly painted exteriors; Hindu-style sunken courtyards in the centre; and window panes made of oyster shells. By the 1980s, many of these grand colonial buildings were largely crumbling. But in recent years, as Goa became a fashionable place for Mumbaikars and Delhiites to maintain vacation homes, the old houses have become prize investments.

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The Panjim Inn is now run by his son, Jack Sukhija, who is an active member of the Goa Heritage Action Group, which works to preserve the state's historic buildings. Situated in a lively corner, the hotel offers 24 simple but comfortable rooms and a restaurant that serves tasty Goan and Indian food on an airy, tree-lined veranda. The house is eclectically decorated with Indian antiques, the odd Scandinavian landscape painting and light fixtures salvaged from shipyards. "I'm the town's leading junk collector," the elder Sukhija says. "It's amazing what you can do with rubbish." His son, who is often behind the front desk, is available to give guests a tour of the neighbourhood's most interesting old buildings.

Not until the past decade have comparable hotels multiplied around Goa. Now there is a range of options. Siolim House, the stunning colonial inn in the north Goan village of Siolim that so charmed me when I stumbled across it on the web, once belonged to the governor of Macao. It was dilapidated when Sood, its current owner, first spotted it in the 1990s. The effort to track down its previous owner took Sood on a chase around the world that passed through Switzerland before ending, improbably, in Compton, California. Sood has done a beautiful job restoring the home. It offers seven rooms, all handsomely furnished. Handsome enough for Kate Moss, in fact, who once rented the house for a week. "We have a kind of self-selection," Sood says. "It's not over-the-top fancy. What you get is a kind of village life. People come here because they are driven by a sense of finding the authentic." The room I stayed in, the Macao Suite, is particularly elegant. Meals are served in an outdoor courtyard next to a pool lined with lush palms, and the friendly staff can arrange on-site yoga classes, ayurvedic massages and Indian cooking lessons.

In part because foreigners who buy a Goan home must operate a business on the property as a condition of the sale, it is not uncommon to find inns and villas owned and run by Europeans. Antonia Graham, for instance, the owner of the Notting Hill interiors shop Graham and Green, renovated a magnificent 150-year-old Goan house in the village of Assagao, called Casa Tota, which she rents out by the week.

And only seven miles down the coast, near the beach in the village of Candolim, is Quelleachy Gally, an inn operated by Marie-Christine Rebillet, a Parisian antiques dealer who drove from France to India in a Volkswagen bus in 1973 and has been coming back ever since. Rebillet's 40-year love affair with the country led her to hunt down and restore this gorgeous Indo-Portuguese home. "I fell in love with the houses," she says of her decision to move to Goa over other parts of India. There are four bedrooms in the main house and two in a cozy garden cottage, all filled with splendid antiques Rebillet has collected over the years. Rebillet, who once made chandeliers out of ping-pong balls for the Jean Paul Gaultier boutique in Paris, has a lovely eye and an idiosyncratic touch; in a sitting room, a vintage photograph of a couple embracing in front of the Taj Mahal hangs above an antique side table on which sits a 1980s plastic radio.

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