The Island of Mozambique

The oldest European building south of the equator

The Island of Mozambique is a coral island about 3 km long and no more than 500 metres wide, lying 4 km off the northern coast at the mouth of Mossuril Bay, joined to the mainland since the 1960s by a 3 km bridge. It gave its name to the whole country. Pottery shows a town stood here by the 14th century at the latest, and by tradition its Swahili founders came from Kilwa; the island had been part of the trade of the Indian Ocean since the 10th century. In 1514 the Portuguese writer Duarte Barbosa noted its Muslim people spoke the same Swahili as Angoche. The name itself comes from Ali Musa Mbiki, Mussa Bin Bique, who ruled the island when Vasco da Gama came by on his way to India.

The Portuguese set up a port and naval base in 1507, and the island became the capital of Portuguese East Africa for nearly four centuries. In 1522 they built the little Chapel of Nossa Senhora de Baluarte, now considered the oldest European building in the Southern Hemisphere. Fort São Sebastião, built between 1558 and 1620, held off Dutch attacks in 1607 and 1608 under the captain-general Dom Estêvão de Ataíde. Slaves, spices and gold passed through, and ships bound for India put in here. The Jesuit college of 1640 became the Palace of São Paulo, the governors' residence and now a museum, and a neoclassical hospital of 1877 was long the largest south of the Sahara.

Then the trade routes moved. The Suez Canal took the shipping away from the long voyage around Africa, the capital went to Lourenço Marques, now Maputo, in 1898, and by the mid-20th century the new harbour at Nacala had taken most of what business remained.

Its two towns survive side by side. In the north stands the stone and lime town, built over centuries with the same techniques, materials and decoration, blending Swahili, Arab, Indian and Portuguese influence, with its churches, mosques and a Hindu temple. In the south, most of the island's roughly 14,000 people live in Makuti Town, a town of reed houses roofed in palm leaf in the traditional African way. UNESCO listed the island as a World Heritage Site in 1991, though many of its historic buildings are in advanced decay and some lie in ruins, and visitors come now for its history and its sandy beaches.