Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL
Capital: Maputo
Population: 34.5 million+
Language: Portuguese (also Emakhuwa, Xichangana, Cisena, Elomwe, Echuwabo)
1 – Mozambique Island (above)
Mozambique Island, a small coral island off the north coast, was a trading port linked to Arab and Swahili merchants for centuries before Vasco da Gama arrived in 1498, and from the early 1500s until 1898 it was the seat of Portuguese rule in East Africa.
Linked to the mainland by a bridge about 3 km long, Mozambique Island is a UNESCO World Heritage Site where the coral-stone Stone Town, guarded by the Fort of São Sebastião, said to be the oldest complete fort standing in sub-Saharan Africa, gives way to the palm-thatched Macuti Town.
The whole country takes its name from Mozambique Island, whose own name is traditionally said to come from Mussa Bin Bique, the local ruler when the first Portuguese ships arrived.
2 – Bazaruto Island
Bazaruto Island is the largest of the five islands of the Bazaruto Archipelago off southern Mozambique, protected since 1971 as the country’s oldest marine park, islands that began as sand spits reaching out from the mainland coast.
Bazaruto rises into towering dunes, among the tallest on any barrier island, with freshwater lakes home to crocodiles, while offshore lie coral reefs teeming with fish and waters visited by five species of sea turtle.
The seagrass beds around Bazaruto hold the last viable population of dugongs in the western Indian Ocean, slow, whiskered relatives of the manatee whose sightings by sailors may have helped inspire tales of mermaids.
3 – Lake Malawi
Lake Malawi, known on Mozambique’s remote north-western shore as Lake Niassa, is one of the great freshwater lakes of Africa’s Rift Valley, often said to have been called the “Lake of Stars” by the explorer David Livingstone.
The Mozambican shore of Lake Malawi is a string of fishing villages and empty beaches backed by forested hills, declared a reserve in 2011 and listed as a Ramsar wetland that year, with waters full of cichlids, most of them found nowhere else.
From time to time vast swarms of lake flies rise from Lake Malawi in columns like smoke, and people along its shore collect them and press them into “kungu cakes” to eat.
4 – Tofo Beach
Tofo Beach, or Praia do Tofo, a palm-fringed beach village in Inhambane province in southern Mozambique, is one of Africa’s best-known hotspots for ocean giants.
Divers and snorkellers at Tofo head out on “ocean safaris” to swim with reef and giant manta rays, both found here all year, while from roughly June to October humpback whales pass close to shore on their migration.
Tofo is one of the few places in the world with whale sharks present all year, and its reef manta population, with more than 1,000 individuals identified, is among the largest documented anywhere.
5 – Gorongosa National Park
Gorongosa National Park, at the southern end of the Great Rift Valley beneath Mount Gorongosa, was set aside as a hunting reserve in 1920, but the civil war of 1977–92 turned it into a battlefield, and more than 90% of its large animals were slaughtered for meat and ivory.
Since 2004 Gorongosa has been rebuilt in a partnership between the Mozambican government and the American philanthropist Greg Carr, and herds of waterbuck and buffalo have returned to the palm-dotted floodplain, with wild dogs reintroduced in 2018.
The elephants of Gorongosa carry the scars of war, because poaching favoured tuskless females, whose share rose from about 18.5% before the war to 50.9% among survivors, a trait linked to genes on the X chromosome and passed on to their daughters.
6 – Maputo
Maputo, Mozambique’s capital on a great bay in the far south, grew as Lourenço Marques, the port for the Transvaal goldfields, where Roger Casement served as British consul in the mid-1890s, and it was renamed Maputo on 3 February 1976.
The railway station in Maputo, opened in 1910, has a dome often wrongly credited to Gustave Eiffel, near the prefabricated iron Casa de Ferro of 1892, and after independence the city named avenues after Mao Tse Tung, Karl Marx and Ho Chi Minh.
In the Second World War neutral Lourenço Marques was a hub of Axis espionage and the scene of a 1942 exchange of Allied and Japanese civilians, while after Mozambique’s civil war artists turned surrendered guns into sculpture, among them Kester’s Throne of Weapons, acquired by the British Museum in 2002.