The Better India · 12 hours ago

How the Navelkar Family Built 'Wildflower Villas' in Candolim, Goa, Without Cutting a Single Tree Down

Where tourism development in Goa typically begins with clearing land, the Navelkar family started with a different question: how do you build without erasing what matters most? Amol Navelkar, whose great-grandfather foraged medicinal herbs from these same eight acres, set one uncompromising rule when creating Wildflower Villas -- "not a single tree would be cut." That choice reduced what could have been a 130-room resort to just seven villas occupying only 12 percent of the land, with each structure designed around the forest rather than the other way around. Now run by Amol's son Nishad and his wife Richa, the property offers something rarer than luxury: estate-grown meals rooted in Saraswat family recipes, unstructured afternoons that honor the old Goan principle of susegad, and the quiet reminder that some trees have been allowed to grow so freely they've pushed through rooflines over the years. What the family has protected here is not just a forest, but a way of belonging to land that refuses to see restraint as loss.