Maputo

The bay was known to Portuguese navigators as Delagoa Bay from the sixteenth century and was worked by ivory and slave traders, but permanent settlement came late. A Portuguese fort was established on the northern shore in 1781 and a town grew around it, taking the name Lourenco Marques after the navigator sent to explore the bay in 1544. The town was repeatedly abandoned, burnt and rebuilt, and was still a minor place when Britain and Portugal disputed ownership of the bay in the 1870s.

What made the city was gold. The railway from the Transvaal reached the bay in the 1890s, and Lourenco Marques became the closest port to Johannesburg's mines, handling their freight and shipping out southern Mozambican men recruited to work underground. Portugal moved the colonial capital here from the Island of Mozambique in 1898. Avenues, a grand railway station of 1910, a botanical garden, and later Art Deco and modernist blocks were built for a growing settler population, while African residents were largely confined to the caniço, the reed suburbs beyond the concrete town.

Independence came in June 1975, and the city was renamed Maputo the following year. Almost all Portuguese residents left within months, taking skills and capital and in some cases wrecking what they could not carry. The civil war that followed spared the city itself but filled it with people fleeing the countryside. Since the 1992 peace it has grown quickly, adding towers, shopping centres and the bridge across the bay to Katembe in 2018, and in late 2024 its streets saw the protests that followed the disputed election.

Maputo is the country's cultural capital, and its signature sound is marrabenta, a dance music built on guitars, tin-can percussion and Ronga and Changana lyrics that grew out of the suburbs in the 1930s and 1940s and is still played in bars and at an annual festival. Younger audiences listen to newer local styles and to South African house and amapiano, an inheritance of the century of labour migration that ties the city to Johannesburg.

Visual art matters here more than in most African capitals. Malangatana Ngwenya's crowded, high-coloured paintings and murals appear on public walls around the city, and the sculptor Alberto Chissano worked in neighbouring Matola, where his house is now a museum; the artists' association Nucleo de Arte has run studios in the centre for decades and became internationally known for sculpture made from decommissioned civil-war weapons. Poetry, in Portuguese, carries unusual weight, with José Craveirinha the best-known name.

Daily manners are Mozambican and unhurried: long greetings, respect for elders, and patience with delay. Capulana cloth is worn, gifted and used to carry children and goods. Catholic and Pentecostal churches fill on Sundays, and ancestral observances continue alongside them. Football is followed intensely, both the local clubs and the South African and European leagues shown in bars.

About 1.1 million people live within the city boundary and about 2.7 million in the wider metropolitan area, which runs into the neighbouring city of Matola. The population is young, growing and mostly housed in the outer bairros, where concrete and reed houses spread across sandy ground with patchy water and power. The formal centre — the Baixa, Polana and Sommerschield — holds the offices, embassies and apartment blocks of a much smaller professional class.

The economy runs on the port and the corridor to South Africa, the railway, government, banking, aid agencies and the university. Alongside it, and employing far more people, is the informal economy of market traders, street vendors, mechanics and chapa crews. Money sent home by relatives working in South Africa supports many households.

The day begins early: chapas fill before dawn, markets open at first light, and offices work through to mid-afternoon. Late afternoon belongs to the Marginal, where people run, swim and eat at the beach grills. Power and water cuts, the cost of living, youth unemployment and crime in the fast-growing suburbs are constant concerns, and the protests of 2024 and 2025 drew on all of them.

Maputo eats from the bay. Prawns are the city's emblem, grilled with garlic, lemon and piri-piri or cooked in coconut sauces, and crab, clams, squid and grilled line fish are sold from the fish market on the Marginal and cooked at the grills beside it. Matapa — young cassava leaves pounded with groundnuts and coconut milk, often with prawns or crab — is the dish most associated with the south, eaten with rice or with xima, the stiff maize porridge that is the everyday staple.

The Portuguese inheritance is strong and unselfconscious: crusty bread rolls, prego and bifana sandwiches, custard tarts, caldo verde and slow-cooked bean stews. Frango a piri-piri, chicken flattened and grilled with a chilli, garlic and lemon sauce, is sold everywhere from roadside braziers to restaurants. Chamussas, the Mozambican samosa, and rissóis are the standard café snacks, and roasted, salted cashews are sold on every corner.

To drink there is 2M and Laurentina beer, both brewed in the city, Laurentina taking its name from the colonial Lourenco Marques; strong coffee served in small cups; sugar cane spirit and local rum, often mixed with soft drinks; and fresh juices from cashew fruit, tamarind and baobab. Cashew nuts, mangoes, coconuts and pineapples are sold by the roadside in season.