Gisenyi

Gisenyi, historically written Kisenyi, grew up in the colonial era on the flat northern shore of Lake Kivu, a plain of old lava flows from Mount Nyiragongo. In 1906 officers of the Congo Free State set up a post at Goma, directly opposite, and the two towns developed facing each other across the frontier, joined by two border crossings. The Rwandan side became a lakeside resort, with hotels along its sandy beaches.

Through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s it kept that character, a modest holiday town where Rwandan officials and expatriates came for the beach, while the Bralirwa brewery, opened in 1959, and the border trade gave it an economy of its own. The American writer and farmer Rosamond Carr, who grew pyrethrum at Mugongo for decades, founded the Imbabazi Orphanage in 1994; it moved to Gisenyi after 1997.

During the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi the interim government relocated to Gisenyi in June, and when the Rwandan Patriotic Front took the town on 18 July it fled into Zaire; hundreds of thousands of refugees crossed the border to Goma, and cross-border insecurity persisted for years afterwards. The 2002 eruption of Mount Nyiragongo sent lava through Goma next door, and some 400,000 people were evacuated across the border into Gisenyi; a further eruption followed in 2021. Tourism returned in the 2000s, and the town, the seat of Rubavu District and often called Rubavu, has grown as a weekend destination and as the northern end of the lakeside trail.

The lake sets the tone. Gisenyi is where Rwandans come to swim, and it is the one place in an otherwise reserved country where public leisure is on show: families and students on the sand at weekends, footballs and volleyball nets, groups drinking on the grass under the palms, boats going out in the late afternoon. Weekend evenings are livelier here than in most Rwandan towns of the size.

It is also a border town, and that shapes its culture. Kinyarwanda is universal, but Swahili and Lingala are heard in the market and among traders, and goods, music and people have crossed the frontier for a century. The town has a long-established Muslim community, its mosque a landmark of the centre, alongside the Catholic and Protestant churches that dominate Sunday.

Fishing gives the shore its own rhythm: crews go out on the lake in wooden boats and bring back the tiny sambaza, or isambaza, a sardine introduced to the lake that is its best-known catch. Onshore, the national customs hold — umuganda on the last Saturday of the month, Kwibuka in April, formal greetings, modest dress away from the water — and visitors who treat the beach as a resort rather than as part of a small provincial town tend to be noticed.

Gisenyi is Rwanda's second-largest city: the Rubavu urban area, which includes it, counted about 547,000 people at the 2022 census, in a district of more than 1,000 people per square kilometre. Fishing, cross-border trade, farming in the hills behind and tourism are the mainstays, along with the brewery of Bralirwa, Rwanda's largest brewer and soft-drinks company, which has worked here since 1959.

The lake itself is an industry. It holds large quantities of dissolved methane, which long fired the brewery's boilers here and is now extracted from offshore platforms to generate electricity for the national grid. The rich volcanic soils in the north-west of the district are farmed intensively and supply the town's market.

Daily life divides between the two halves of the town. Along the shore are the hotels, the beach and the quiet avenues; behind them is a busy working centre of market stalls, bars, workshops and bus queues that has grown quickly and untidily as people have moved in from the countryside. Cross-border trade with the Congolese side is a mainstay of the district's economy, and the conflict in eastern Congo, which worsened sharply in early 2025, is felt directly here in movement across the border and in the fortunes of the market.

Gisenyi eats from the lake. Sambaza — small silvery sardines from the lake — are fried whole and crisp and eaten by the handful with a squeeze of lime and a beer, and are the dish visitors are told to try first. Tilapia is the larger catch, grilled over charcoal or stewed with tomato and onion and served with chips, rice or cooked banana, and is the standard sit-down meal at the lakeside bars.

Away from the water the food is that of the country: the midday buffet of rice, beans, cooked green banana, cassava, sweet potato and isombe, the cassava leaf pounded with groundnut; brochettes of goat grilled to order in the evening with grilled plantain and a raw tomato-and-onion relish; fried pork at weekends; and sambusa, chapati and grilled maize from street stalls.

The town has a brewer's reputation, since Bralirwa brews Primus, Mützig and other beers here, and they are drunk cold everywhere alongside the national soft drinks. Rwandan tea and coffee are both sold locally, and the market fills each morning with passion fruit, tree tomato, avocado and pineapple alongside the day's fish.