Neendakara is a village in Kollam district

Kollam district

-Climate:Kollam's temperature is almost steady throughout the year. The average temperature ranges from 25 to 32 degrees Celsius. Summer usually runs from March until May; the monsoon begins by June and ends by September. Kollam receives an annual average rainfall of around...

 9 km north of Kollam

Kollam

Kollam , often anglicized as ', is a city in the Indian state of Kerala. The city lies on the banks of Ashtamudi Lake on the Arabian sea coast and is situated about north of the state capital, Thiruvananthapuram...

 city in Kerala

Kerala

or Keralam is an Indian state located on the Malabar coast of south-west India. It was created on 1 November 1956 by the States Reorganisation Act by combining various Malayalam speaking regions....

, India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

. It is Kollam district's intermediate fishing port.

When Portuguese

Portugal

Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...

 traders settled in Kollam (then Quilon) in the early 16th century, their ships passed through the Neenadakara bar

Bar (river morphology)

A bar in a river is an elevated region of sediment that has been deposited by the flow. Types of bars include mid-channel bars , point bars , and mouth bars...

, now the site of Neendakara Bridge, part of National Highway 47, which connects the village to Shakthikulangara across Ashtamudi Lake

Ashtamudi Lake

Ashtamudi Lake in the Kollam District of Kerala, India, is the second largest and deepest wetland ecosystem, a palm-shaped large water body, next only to the Vembanad estuary ecosystem of the state. Ashtamudi means 'eight coned' in the local language of Malayalam...

. In Malayalam

Malayalam language

Malayalam , is one of the four major Dravidian languages of southern India. It is one of the 22 scheduled languages of India with official language status in the state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Pondicherry. It is spoken by 35.9 million people...

, Neendakara means "a long bank".

The headquarters of the Indo-Norwegian Fisheries Community project, established in 1953, was based in Neendakara until 1961, when the site was handed over to the Government of Kerala

Government of Kerala

The Government of Kerala is a democratically elected body that governs the State of Kerala, India for a period of 5 years. The state government is headed by the Governor of Kerala as the nominal head of state, with a democratically elected Chief Minister as real head of the executive. The state...

.