Where is Melaka?
Malaysia is situated one to seven degrees north of the equator. The State of Melaka, one of the fourteen states within Malaysia, is situated on the South-Western Coast of Peninsular Malaysia facing the Straits of Melaka and sandwiched between the states of Negeri Sembilan and Johor.
Melaka covers an area of 1,658 square kilometers and is divided into three districts, namely Melaka Tengah, Alor Gajah and Jasin.
The North-South Expressway allows easy access into Melaka from all states of Malaysia. It takes about an hour and a half to travel by road from Kuala Lumpur to Melaka and approximately three hours from Singapore.
Another way to get to Melaka from Kuala Lumpur is to take a leisurely drive through the coastal and country roads passing through Klang, Morib and Port Dickson before arriving in Melaka. Those coming from Singapore can take the picturesque route passing through coastal kampungs or villages and plantations.

Where it all began .....
No historian has been able up to now to pin-point the year Malacca was founded.
Going by the State government's celebration of the 600th anniversary of the founding in August 1990, it could be deduced that Malacca was founded in 1390.
However, some historians had placed the founding at between 1376 and 1400.
That s Sumatran prince, named Parameswara, was credited with the founding of the city and naming it Melaka in not disputed.
A popular account puts the Prince as out hunting one day and while resting under a tree, one of his dogs cornered a mouse-deer or 'pelandok'.
The mouse-deer in its defense attacked the dog and even forced it into the river-water. Parameswara was so taken up by the courage of the mouse-deer that he decided on the spot to found a city on the ground he was sitting on. Thus, Melaka or Malacca was born. Many claimed that the prince took this name from the 'Melaka' tree that was shading him.
As time went on, Melaka grew bigger and bigger and became more and more prosperous. Parameswara, incidentally, was the first Malay prince to become a Muslim and inevitably, Islam became the religion of Malays in the Peninsular (now West Malaysia).
The prince known as Iskandar Shah died in 1424. During his rule, Melaka progressed into a booming international trading post, luring over Javanese, Indian, Arab and Chinese sea-merchants.
Under Sultan Mansur Shah (1456 - 1477), Melaka's fame and wealth not long after caught the attention of the expansionist Europeans with the Portuguese becoming the first to arrive and eventually going on to conquer the land. They were led by Alfonso d'Albuquerque.
The Portuguese occupiers stayed on far 130 years and their King benefited immensely from this. After the Dutch captured Melaka from the Portuguese in 1641, they continued to use Batavia, now Jakarta, as their head quarters.

The Origin of the Name "Melaka"
As far as could be ascertained there are no less than three versions as where the State of Malacca derived its name. The least probable of the three was from Gaspar Correa made in the 16th century.
He contended that Malacca (Melaka) was derived from Mulagas which was a kind of salted fish exported from the state.
A version mildly accepted was that the name came from Mulagah which is Arab for a meeting. The acceptance of this version was attributed to Malacca being a meeting place in the 15th and 16th centuries for merchants from countries near and far..
There were, however, scholars who contended that the Malays then would not have accepted an Arabic term because the Arab merchants at the time were not a prominent community.
More scholars and historians were agreed that Malacca (Melaka) derived its name from a tree, the 'pokok Melaka'. Their reasoning was that the local inhabitants at the time were fond of naming places after plants or trees. The Melaka tree was then also growing in abundance along the banks of Air Lereh.
Some of the places that bear the names of trees or plants to this day are Kampung Alai, Kampung Bertam, Pengkalan Kempas, Kampung Merlimau and Kampung Kundang.