This capital's coastline is made of lava.
Moroni sits on an Indian Ocean island and has no beaches: its shore is a rocky volcanic coastline, almost without sand. Thirty square kilometres of city at twenty-nine metres above the sea, at the foot of an active 2,361-metre volcano. Everything here that looks tropical came after the rock.
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01 An island without sand
It is worth understanding why, because it explains the whole island. Ngazidja — the local name for Grande Comore, the largest of the country's three main islands — is geologically very young. On a young volcanic island there has not been time enough for the swell to grind lava into sand. What there is are flows that reached the sea and stopped there.
02 At the foot of the volcano
The city sits on the western coast of Ngazidja, twenty-nine metres above sea level, across some thirty square kilometres. Behind it, without transition, Karthala begins to rise: 2,361 metres, an active shield volcano, with more than twenty recorded eruptions since the nineteenth century and the last in January 2007.
That proximity orders the city. Moroni cannot grow inland past a certain contour, because inland is a continuous slope climbing to the caldera. So it grows along the coast: north to Itsandra, Ntsoudjini, Ouellah, Bahani; south to Ikoni, Mvouni, Daoueni, Séléa. A line of settlements on a narrow strip between the rock and the water.
03 From six thousand to a hundred and eleven
The name means "at the river" — mroni in Shingazidja — and describes a modest origin. For centuries Moroni was one of many large settlements on the island, and not even the leading one: it shared the economic weight of the kingdom of Bambao with neighbouring Ikoni. Its prosperity as an Indian Ocean port is documented from at least the middle of the second millennium.
The leap is recent and can be dated precisely. In 1958 the town had 6,545 inhabitants. That same year the decision was taken to move the archipelago's capital here, and from then on it grew into the largest place in the country. In 2016 it was estimated at 111,326: seventeen times the 1958 figure.
That growth had to be resolved on thirty square kilometres of volcanic ground, with the sea in front and the slope behind. There is not much margin, and it shows: the old town is a compact maze of narrow alleys, and what is new has stacked up around it with hardly any open space.
04 How you cover it
The city can be walked entire, and it should be walked slowly. The old town, the medina, is a maze of alleys and old buildings covered without a map, because a map is no use. Inside there are dated structures: the oldest of its mosques was built in 1427, and its minaret was added in 1921. It is the material record of when this city was rich.
The second thing to do is leave the city on the coast road — Route Nationale 1 passes through here — and watch the settlements follow one another on the same narrow strip. It is the best way to grasp that Moroni is not a city with suburbs, but a denser stretch of a continuous string.
And a final warning, the same one this article opens with. If you come looking for the Indian Ocean of the postcards, you will have to go and find it. What Moroni offers is another thing: a city of dark stone on a young island, with an active volcano behind it and an old town that has been in the same place for six centuries.
