Fort Portal

Fort Portal is a young town in an old kingdom. Tooro broke away from Bunyoro-Kitara in the 1830s under Prince Kaboyo, and its kings ruled the hills below the Rwenzori from shifting capitals. In the 1890s the area was drawn into the British advance: a fort was built here during the campaigns against Bunyoro's Omukama Kabalega, and it was named after Sir Gerald Portal, the British consul who had led a mission to Uganda and died in 1894.

The fort became an administrative station, and the town grew around it on the ridges, with a mission, a school and a hospital, while the Omukama's court settled on the neighbouring hill. Tea was planted on the surrounding slopes under colonial rule, and the estates, the Kilembe copper railway to the south and the road from Kampala tied the town into the colonial economy.

The kingdoms were abolished in 1967 and the palace fell into disrepair; Tooro was restored as a cultural institution in 1993, and Oyo Nyimba Kabamba Iguru Rukidi IV came to the throne as a small child in 1995, one of the youngest monarchs in the world at the time; he reigned until his death in 2026. The palace was rebuilt and reoccupied in the following years.

Tourism arrived with the gazetting of Kibale as a national park in 1993 and the growth of chimpanzee tracking, and the town slowly became the base for the crater lakes, the Rwenzori and the western parks. In July 2020 Fort Portal was granted city status, promoted as Uganda's tourism city.

This is Batooro country, and the kingdom is the backbone of local identity even though it has no political power. The Omukama's coronation anniversary and other royal occasions fill the streets with drumming, dancing and processions, and the palace on its hill is the image the city uses of itself.

The most distinctive custom is the empaako. Every Mutooro and Munyoro is given, besides a personal and a family name, one of a small set of praise names — Amooti, Akiiki, Atwooki, Abwooli and a few others — which are used in greeting instead of the personal name to show affection and respect. Greeting someone by their empaako softens any encounter, and the practice, shared with Bunyoro, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2013 on its list of intangible cultural heritage in need of urgent safeguarding.

Rutooro, the language, is close enough to Runyoro that the two are often treated as one. Christianity dominates, with old Anglican and Catholic missions on the hills and Pentecostal churches multiplying in the newer quarters, and Muslim families are long established around the market.

Tea shapes the working culture: estate labour, smallholder plucking and the factories' shift horns are part of the week for thousands of households. The city has a quieter, more leisurely reputation than Kasese or Mbarara, and a steady flow of researchers, conservationists and volunteers from the forest projects gives its cafés an outward-looking feel.

The 2014 census counted about 54,000 people in the municipality; the city boundaries have since widened and the number living in the built-up area is higher. It is the main centre for the Tooro sub-region, serving a much larger farming population that comes in for the market, the hospital, the banks and the secondary schools.

Tea is the biggest employer: the estates and smallholdings on the hills around feed factories that process leaf for export, and lorries of green leaf move through the city daily. Bananas, coffee, maize, beans and Irish potatoes are grown on the deep volcanic soils, dairy farming has expanded, and fish from the crater lakes reaches the market. Tourism supports guides, drivers, lodges and craft groups, and the oil developments around Lake Albert to the north have brought contractors, new roads and higher rents.

Mornings start early with the market and the school run; the working day ends with a heavy afternoon shower more often than not, and the bars and roadside grills fill in the evening. The city has grown quickly since city status, and the familiar strains follow: land prices, traffic on the single main road, pressure on water and drainage, and building on the wetlands along the Mpanga. Its position, cool and green with the mountains in view, still makes it one of the more comfortable places to live in Uganda.

The Tooro table leans on matooke — green bananas steamed in their leaves and mashed — with beans, groundnut sauce, greens and a little meat or fish. The local speciality is firinda, beans cooked long and soft with the skins removed to a smooth mash, often enriched with smoked or dried fish; it appears at ceremonies, in home kitchens and in local restaurants.

Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava, millet bread and posho fill out the staples, and the crater lakes and Lake George supply tilapia, fried whole or stewed. Ghee and milk are used more heavily here than in southern or eastern Uganda, a habit shared with Ankole and Bunyoro. Roadside charcoal grills sell muchomo, skewers of goat or beef, and the rolex — a chapati rolled around a fried egg with tomato, cabbage and onion — is the everyday snack.

Tea is the city's crop and its drink, boiled strong with milk and often ginger; arabica coffee grows on the same hills and is increasingly roasted locally. The older local drinks are tonto, fermented from bananas, and obushera, a sorghum or millet drink taken mildly sweet or left to ferment into beer, along with banana waragi distilled in the villages. Bottled lagers and sodas are sold everywhere, and avocados, jackfruit and passion fruit are piled cheap in the market.