Audioguides Maputo

Maputo grew from a Portuguese fort established on Delagoa Bay in 1781, named Lourenco Marques after the 16th-century navigator. The British wanted it, the Boers fought over it, and the Portuguese held it until 1975, when Mozambican independence renamed it Maputo after the local river. The new country immediately inherited a civil war that lasted until 1992 and left much of the city's infrastructure in the condition of a building mid-renovation: partially destroyed, partially rebuilt, with layers of different eras visible simultaneously. This history is not a warning, it is the city's most interesting quality.

The wide avenues lined with jacaranda and acacia trees that earned Maputo the nickname 'City of Acacias' are a Portuguese colonial legacy that the city chose to keep, and in November when the jacarandas bloom purple across the Avenida Julius Nyerere and the Avenida Samora Machel, the effect is genuinely beautiful.

The Maputo Railway Station, completed in 1910 to a design attributed to the studio of Gustave Eiffel, is an Art Nouveau confection of wrought iron and curved glass whose main hall is still functioning as an active train terminal. The Mercado Central on Avenida 25 de Setembro is a covered market of the highest noise and energy, selling everything from fresh fish to printed capulana fabric to the specific chaos of a tropical city still figuring out what it wants to be.