The city was planted before it was finished.
Maputo was laid out in the late nineteenth century with a grid of wide avenues on the shore of a bay 95 kilometres long. And with the streets came acacias and jacarandas, in quantity enough for the city to end up known as 'the city of acacias'. The trees are not a later ornament: they are part of the plan.
01 A bay ninety-five kilometres long
The settlement grew around a Portuguese fortress completed in 1787. For almost a century it was little more than a post: what turned the place into a city was the port, and what made the port matter was the railway that linked it to the interior of the continent.
The name also has two periods. The city was called Lourenço Marques, after a navigator who passed through in 1544, and changed to its present name in February 1976, taking it from the Maputo River. Today it has 1,088,449 inhabitants according to the 2017 census, and the metropolitan area reaches 2.7 million counting Matola.
02 The grid and the Baixa
The centre is laid out on a grid, with wide avenues and regular blocks, in the Portuguese town-planning manner of the late nineteenth century. The historic part of that grid, beside the port, is known as the Baixa, and it preserves the original layout practically intact.
What is interesting about that grid is that it was drawn before there was a city to put inside it. It is not the result of regularising an existing fabric, as in so many capitals, but a plan drawn on free ground and filled in afterwards, decade by decade, with whatever arrived.
That explains the architectural mixture, one of the most varied on the continent within a few blocks. Early twentieth-century buildings — such as the central railway station of 1913-1916, beaux-arts in feel — coexist with mid-century modern blocks and recent towers, all on the same chequerboard.
03 Acacias and jacarandas
The feature that most defines Maputo's urban landscape is not a building but the street trees. The avenues were planted with acacias and jacarandas, in quantity enough for the city to earn two nicknames: 'the city of acacias' and 'the pearl of the Indian Ocean'.
It also works as a calendar. Jacarandas flower in violet and acacias in intense red, and those flowerings completely change the look of whole streets for a few weeks a year. It is a detail that does a good deal to decide the timing of the visit for anyone who travels looking.
The other effect of the trees is thermal and very practical. In a city where the mean high exceeds 30 degrees from November to March, an avenue with continuous crowns and one without them are not walked the same way. Street shade is infrastructure, not gardening.
04 How it is covered
The centre is easily walkable: flat, orthogonal and compact. The useful way to cover it is to come down from the upper part towards the port following one of the tree-lined avenues, which is how you cross in one go the different built periods sitting on the same chequerboard.
It is also worth going down to the waterfront. The bay is enormous and alive: cargo port, moored fishing boats and, on the far side, Inhaca Island closing the whole. From the water you understand why the city was placed on exactly this shore.
And a note on the calendar that surprises here: the best time of year is the austral winter. Between May and August, 15 to 32 millimetres fall per month and sunshine exceeds 245 hours, with highs of 26 to 28 degrees. In January, 171 millimetres fall.
