Vizag — India's only major port city on the Eastern Coast with beaches, submarine museums, and the Araku Valley coffee country winding through Eastern Ghats hills an hour away
Visakhapatnam (pop. 2.3 million) — universally called 'Vizag' — sits on the Bay of Bengal in Andhra Pradesh, flanked by forested hills (the Eastern Ghats) and beaches of the Coromandel Coast. India's oldest surviving shipyard (Hindustan Shipyard, established 1941) and an important naval base share the harbor with one of the country's better beach promenades, the R.K. Beach. The city has an unusual variety: INS Kursura, a decommissioned Soviet-era submarine, is open as a museum at Beach Road; the Borra Caves (80 km north, the largest caves on the Indian subcontinent) and the Araku Valley (a co…
Visakhapatnam's harbor has been known to traders since antiquity — it appears in the accounts of the ancient Tamil Sangam poets as a port city called 'Visakhapattana'. The city came under the Eastern Chalukya dynasty, then the Gajapati Kingdom of Odisha, then the Vijayanagara Empire before British acquisition in 1804. The British East India Company developed the natural deep-water harbor and established a military presence; by the 20th century the harbor's strategic depth made it India's premier Eastern naval base. The shipyard, established during World War II to supply the Pacific theater, c…