Tôlanaro

The peninsula was Antanosy country when Europeans first sheltered in its bays. Portuguese ships reached this coast in the sixteenth century, and in 1643 the French East India Company built a fort here and named it Fort Dauphin after the young heir to the French throne. Étienne de Flacourt, its governor from 1648, wrote a history of Madagascar that remained Europeans' main source on the island until the late nineteenth century. Relations with the Antanosy broke down repeatedly, and the settlement was abandoned in 1674.

The site kept its name and its strategic value. The French returned during the conquest of Madagascar in the 1890s, and French troops took the town in 1896. It became a small port for cattle, sisal and produce from the mountains behind, and after the Second World War roads linked it to Toliara and Fianarantsoa. From the early 1970s the town declined for lack of good road connections, and it has depended on the sea and on aircraft ever since.

The largest change came with the Mandena ilmenite mine on the coastal dunes nearby, run by a Rio Tinto subsidiary, and the deep-water port built for it at Ehoala, west of the town, which opened in 2009. The project brought roads, power and jobs, and also local opposition, with protests in 2013 and 2022 and the contamination of a lake in 2014–2015. Tourism, built on beaches, surf and the reserves inland, runs alongside it.

Tôlanaro is the town of the Antanosy, the "people of the island", whose name may refer to an island in the Efaho river, just west of the town, where the Zafiraminia first settled. Antanosy custom centres on the ancestors, and tombs and funerals carry great weight. Fady, the system of prohibitions that runs through all of Madagascar, is observed closely here and varies from one village to the next.

Because the town has been a meeting point for four centuries, its population is mixed: Antanosy, Antandroy from the dry west, people from other parts of Madagascar, and families descended from French, Chinese and Pakistani merchants. French is widely heard, a legacy of the colonial administration and the long missionary presence, and church life — Catholic and Lutheran — is central to the weekly rhythm.

Music and dance mark ceremonies and holidays, with accordion, guitar and drums, and the coast's fishing communities keep their own songs for launching and hauling boats. The surf that breaks off the headlands has drawn a small but steady following, and football is the sport played on every flat piece of ground.

Tens of thousands of people live in Tôlanaro, spread over the peninsula and the slopes behind it, and it is the capital and largest town of the Anosy region. Work comes from fishing and the fish trade, from the market and small commerce, from regional administration, from the mineral sands mine and port, and from tourism, which is seasonal and modest. Sisal from the plains to the west is another regional export.

Housing runs from the concrete and tin of the centre to timber and palm-thatch quarters on the edges, with newer building around the roads to the port and the airport. Water and power supplies are intermittent, and the town's isolation keeps the price of imported goods high, since almost everything arrives by sea or by air rather than over the mountains.

The day starts with the boats and the market and slows in the wet afternoons. Rain is a constant here in a way it is not elsewhere in the south, so the surrounding hills stay green and cultivated, with rice in the valleys, cassava and bananas on the slopes, and litchi trees around the villages. The mine dominates local argument, praised for jobs and blamed for displacement and dust, and unemployment among young people is high.

The sea is the town's larder. Lobster, crab, prawns, squid, octopus and reef and deep-water fish are landed at the harbour and along the bay, and are usually grilled over charcoal or simmered with tomato, ginger and coconut milk. Whatever the dish, it is served with vary, rice, which is eaten at every meal, and the chilli paste sakay is on the table.

Beyond seafood, the cooking is the national repertoire adapted to a wetter, greener hinterland: romazava, the beef and leafy-greens stew flavoured with the tongue-numbing anamalao; ravitoto, pounded cassava leaves cooked with pork; beans, greens and dried fish in broth over rice in the small hotely canteens around the market. Cassava, sweet potato and maize fill out meals when rice is short.

The hills behind the town grow bananas, litchis, mangoes, pineapple and coffee, and the fruit fills the market stalls in season. Ranon'ampango, the smoky water boiled in the emptied rice pot, is drunk with meals; Three Horses Beer, rum from Malagasy cane and strong sweet coffee are the rest of the list.