Percival Noronha

Noronha was born on 26 July 1923 in Margao in Portuguese India, to Antonio Jose Jonas Noronha and Maria Aurora Anastasia da Silveira Vital. The family were bhatkars, or local landholders; his father was from Loutolim and his mother from Ilhas, and both settled in Margao. He later lived in the Fontainhas quarter of Panaji, where his home became a gathering place for scholars and researchers; colleagues described him as an encyclopaedia on Goan history. He died at Verna, Goa, on 19 August 2019, aged 96.

Noronha worked in the Portuguese administration in Goa and continued in the Indian administration after 1961, serving as chief information officer and later as chief protocol officer, and as under-secretary with responsibility for several departments. He helped establish the Carnival floats parade in Goa, which became a tourist attraction, and oversaw the planting of casuarina trees between the children's park at Campal and Miramar beach to counter coastal erosion.

He wrote A Walk through Old Goa, a guide to the UNESCO World Heritage site, and lectured on Indo-Portuguese subjects in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany, Japan and Macau. He was a founder member of the Goa chapter of the Indian Heritage Society.

In December 1982, the year he retired, Noronha founded the Association of Friends of Astronomy (Goa) in Panaji, the first astronomy club in the state, with the aim of popularising amateur astronomy. He set up an astronomical observatory with a telescope on the terrace of Junta House in Panaji. The Public Astronomical Observatory there was established in 1990 and is described as the first public observatory in India; it operates under the Goa government's Department of Science, Technology and Environment and is run voluntarily by members of the association. Further observatories followed at Margao in 2003, Mapusa in 2010, and Vasco and Canacona in 2013, along with rural astronomy centres at Morjim, Borim and Sanquelim. Noronha guided the association until the end of his life.

Noronha received at least seventeen international awards. Among them were the United Nations Peace Medal in 1972, a medal of the Clube Militar de Macau, and the Ordem do Merito in the rank of Comendador, Portugal's highest civilian honour, in 2014.[2][3][4][5]