why is it so?

Life here is a luxury. Far more relaxed than the other parts of India I've traveled in, life just goes at a slower pace here. The tourist scene, while sometimes obnoxious, is more subdued than in Goa, India's other tropical paradise. Amazing Keralan dishes that have a profusion of coconut and fresh caught fish have provided the majority of my diet here. Everyone you meet in India, foreign or Indian, tells you how beautiful Kerala is, and its true, there is lush verdant greenery everywhere. But palm trees can only go so far. The mental image of a thing somehow doesn't correspond with reality. It is beautiful, true, but perhaps its more the feel of a place that gives it its beauty. There is consensus, such a thing is beautiful, but why is it so? Standards of human beauty have changed throughout history; have standards of landscape beauty correspondingly changed as well? Or is there something intrinsic that speaks to us about the beauty of certain places? People go mad for sunsets and sunrises (if they wake up in time), but why? Is it through depiction of a thing as beautiful, or because of some inner knowing that a thing has beauty?