The historic inner city of Paramaribo

A wooden cathedral, and a synagogue beside a mosque

Paramaribo, the capital of Suriname, sits on the left bank of the Suriname River about 15 km in from the Atlantic, and almost half the country lives there. The name probably comes from a native village that the earliest Dutch sources spelled Parmurbo, and the Dutch kept a trading post on the spot from 1613. The English arrived in 1650, sent by Lord Willoughby, the governor of Barbados, and reinforced an abandoned French fort as Fort Willoughby. In 1667, during the Second Anglo-Dutch War, the Dutch admiral Abraham Crijnssen took it in a battle that lasted only three hours, until the English ran out of munitions. He renamed it Fort Zeelandia for the Dutch province that had paid for his fleet, and the Treaty of Breda that year left the colony Dutch. The town was renamed New Middelburg too, but the inhabitants never took to it.

From 1683 the streets were laid out on a grid running north-west from the fort, following natural shell ridges that kept the building ground drained, and by the end of the 18th century Dutch engineers had carried the town north over the marsh. Most of the houses are wood, plain and symmetrical, a Dutch style worked out in local timber and craft, with later touches from North America and Creole culture. UNESCO listed the inner city in 2002, finding most of its fabric from 1680 to 1800 virtually intact, largely because decades of slow economic growth had left it alone. The landmarks include the Presidential Palace of 1730, stone below and wood above; the brick Ministry of Finance of 1841 with its clock tower; and the Gothic Revival Roman Catholic cathedral of 1885, built in wood.

Timber cities burn. A fire in January 1821 destroyed more than 400 buildings, and after another in September 1832 took nearly 50, three enslaved men, Kodjo, Mentor and Present, were found guilty of arson and burned alive. Slavery ended in 1863, and from 1873, when the freed workers were allowed to leave the sugar plantations, the city grew fast.

Among the first English settlers were many Jews. The Neveh Shalom synagogue on Keizerstraat stands on a lot Sephardi Jews bought in 1716; the present neoclassical building by J. F. Halfhide was completed in 1842, and the Ashkenazi and Sephardi congregations, separate since 1735, merged in the 1990s. The city around it is now about 27 percent Creole, 23 percent East Indian, 16 percent Maroon and 10 percent Javanese.

Fort Zeelandia carries a darker chapter too. In 1982, under the military government of Dési Bouterse, it was the scene of the December murders. Today it houses the Surinamese Museum, with its ethnographic collections.