Lourenço Marques reborn as Mozambique’s bay capital
Maputo, Mozambique’s capital and largest city, sits near the country’s south within 120 km of Eswatini and South Africa, with 1,088,449 residents in recent counts. Ancestral Tsonga fishers settled the bay; Portuguese named it for navigator Lourenço Marques, who explored in 1544, before a fort seeded the modern city.
Rivers Tembe, Mbuluzi, Matola, and Infulene meet a broad Indian Ocean bay. Seven administrative divisions break into bairros, wrapped by Maputo Province. Landmarks include Independence Square, City Hall, the fortress, central market, Tunduru Gardens, and the railway station.
The city covers 347.69 square kilometres and is run as a separate province from the surrounding Maputo Province. Wide avenues lined with jacaranda and acacia earned it the nickname City of Acacias, though much of it is dilapidated. Lourenço Marques, the navigator, was sent with António Caldeira by Mozambique's governor in 1544 to explore the rivers draining into Delagoa Bay. The Portuguese fort dates from 1781.
An 1871 visitor found a poor place of narrow streets, grass huts, decaying forts and a rusty cannon inside a new 1.8-metre wall. On 24 July 1875 the French president Patrice de MacMahon settled a British–Portuguese dispute in Portugal's favour. The settlement became a town on 9 December 1876 and a city on 10 November 1887, and the rise of the Transvaal next door boosted it. By the early twentieth century its port, with electric cranes loading straight onto railway wagons, had made it a lively cosmopolitan city.
The University of Lourenço Marques opened in 1962, and before independence tourists from South Africa and Rhodesia flocked to its beaches, hotels and casinos. The liberation movement FRELIMO, founded in Tanzania in 1962 under Eduardo Mondlane, fought for more than ten years until Lisbon's Carnation Revolution of 1974. Independence came on 25 June 1975 with the proclamation of a People's Republic. Maputo Bay is 95 kilometres long and 30 wide, with Inhaca Island at its eastern edge, and the city averages 829.6 millimetres of rain a year.
Source: Maputo
