The city is named after the stone it is made of.

01 The name is the ground

The landscape of this part of Lesotho is a succession of sandstone tablelands cut into steps. The rock crops out in horizontal bands ranging from ochre to honey to brick red, and when the light falls sideways the cut reads like the pages of a book stood on its edge. No interpretation is needed: the city's name is literally what you see.

The city sits at about 1,600 metres, on the country's western edge, beside the Caledon River — the Mohokare in Sesotho — which here marks the border with South Africa. It is Lesotho's low point: from Maseru, almost any road you take goes up.

02 A camp from 1869

Maseru was founded in 1869 as a small police camp, when the territory became the British protectorate of Basutoland. It was not born as a city and did not intend to be one: it was an administrative post placed on the country's edge, beside the river crossing, to watch and to administer.

That origin explains the plan. The centre is compact and simply laid out, with one main avenue — Kingsway — running through it and the blocks hung off it. There is no historic core tangling in on itself, because there was never an earlier city: there is a small grid that grew outwards.

The city today has around 330,000 inhabitants. In a country of a little over two million, that means roughly one in seven people in Lesotho lives here, and roughly half the country's urban population. For what you see walking it — a low-rise city, spread out and open — that concentration is surprising.

03 The stone that is cut and stacked

The sandstone of this region has a property that decided how building was done here: it cuts easily when freshly quarried and hardens in the air. That makes it cheap to work and durable once laid, and it explains why the functional buildings of the first decades went up in it rather than in materials brought from outside.

The result is a colour range that repeats everywhere and is the first thing that lodges in the memory: walls of uneven blocks in honey, ochre and red, laid dry or with wide joints, in official buildings, in boundary walls, in kerbs and in the plinths of much more recent construction. The stone outlives the style that used it.

04 How it is covered

The centre is walkable without difficulty: it is small, flat in its lower part and organised around a single avenue. The useful way to cover it is to pay attention to the plinths and the boundary walls, which is where the old sandstone is still in place even when the building above has been remade three times.

The other half of the visit is looking up. The ridges closing the valley — the red rock visible from almost any street — are the same material the city is made of, and from them the relationship between name, ground and walls becomes clear at once. It is a reading that takes an afternoon.

And it is worth remembering where you are: 1,600 metres. The city does not look it, because it lies across a wide valley and has none of the air of a mountain place, but the altitude tells the moment the sun goes down and the moment you take any of the roads heading east.