Tour Audio a Porto-Novo

Porto-Novo holds the peculiar distinction of being Benin's official capital while actual governing happens 30 kilometres west in Cotonou. The Portuguese renamed it in 1730 after noticing its resemblance to their home city, but the Yoruba who lived here first called it Ajashe, and the Gun people knew it as Hogbonu. Three names for one place says something essential about how this city absorbs identities without surrendering its own.

Wander the streets around King Toffa's Palace, now a museum, and the Afro-Brazilian inflection of the architecture stops you short.

This is where freed slaves returned from Brazil in the 19th century and built in a style that blended the tropics on two continents. The Grande Mosquee's unusual design borrows from Bahian churches, which themselves borrowed from Portuguese colonists, which is the kind of layered irony that Porto-Novo generates without effort.