Just a few hundred yards off the southern tip of Ilha de Moçambique sits a tiny rock island covered completely by a squat 17th-century Portuguese stone fort. Supposedly, when the tide goes out, you have an hour to walk out, explore, and get back.
During four days on Ilha, itself a speck in the Indian Ocean—and once the capital of Portuguese Africa—I asked locals again and again: When does this low tide occur? From shopkeepers to guides to the front desk of the island’s only full-service hotel, the Omuhipiti, nobody knew for sure.
The only one who seemed interested in giving me advice was a diminutive boy of 12 who called himself Harry Potter. Harry endeared himself with a polite, ever-present grin, hanging around and waiting for me to ask for his help rather than approaching with a salesman’s pitch. On our outings he often scampered ahead, stopping to play with babies or talk to friends, and at the end of my visit what he asked for before money was a bracelet of perfumed wooden beads I wore to ward off mosquitoes. Harry claimed to speak Spanish, English, and Italian along with Portuguese (the national language) and several African languages—the kind of wizardry that had earned him his nickname from a previous employer.
Based on Harry’s opinion of the tides, I rose around six one morning and walked the island’s two-kilometer length. The trip took me through Ilha’s collection of ancient colonial buildings, through charmingly laid-out squares, along a windy stretch of the Indian Ocean, into the cane-roofed section where most people make their homes, and past the whitewashed São Antonio church. The double-porticoed former court building, with its opera-house staircase unfolding from the front, glowed in the sunrise. At a Catholic cemetery, a black coffin rested in a church whose walls were camouflaged with mold.
Finally, I arrived at a rocky beach where I could see the São Lourenço fort still locked up across the warm water. I waited for several hours, chewing PowerBars, but Moses I was not—the seas did not part.
But as I sat on the stone bench outside a Hindu cemetery, Ilha went about its business without me. First one man, then another, came by to rake through the smoldering piles of trash that littered this end of the island, looking for anything of value. Finding nothing, they left. Men in dugout canoes plied the waters between Ilha and the fort, checking their traps for squid and giant prawns.
I wondered how, in this UNESCO World Heritage Site, the most beautiful place I’d been in Mozambique, simple information about what should be a popular attraction was unavailable. Such disorganization seemed common during my visit, but honestly, it was also kind of welcome. Instead of feeling put out by my inability to check off the fort in my Lonely Planet and move on to the next-listed attraction, I was happy simply to stroll.
“You just sit and look at the shadow of the past,” said a Dutch tourist who seemed bored after a couple of days there. “There’s nothing else to do.”
Ilha’s isolation is a product of history as well as geography. In the 16th century, in the early days of the Portuguese empire, the watery surroundings and another huge fort, São Sebastião, made Ilha an excellent spot from which to defend the coastline from Turkish, Dutch, and other colonizers. Once the area was settled, however, the colony’s needs outgrew the island, and in 1898 the capital moved almost 2,000 miles south,
to mainland Lourenço Marques, now the present-day capital of Maputo.
That move left Ilha frozen in time. About half the island is covered in colonial-era buildings, many of which have fallen into spectacular ruin. Most are two or three stories high with wide, arabesque windows and ornate dormered tile roofs. Cane shacks occupy some of the shells, while others are covered in rubble and overrun by ropy, palm-like trees. Among the well-preserved are the former governor’s palace, a faded red building with a pointy bell tower and an interior courtyard dotted with bronzes of torch-bearing women. Between high white pilasters, a worn wooden door leads to a museum. Fort São Sebastião contains what is said to be the oldest European structure in the Southern Hemisphere: the Chapel of Nossa Senhora de Baluarte, a modest manueline monument built in 1522.
My first morning on Ilha, I was São Sebastião’s only visitor. Two unofficial-looking gentlemen, one of them shirtless, sold me a $5 ticket. One gave me a tour that veered from his crappy English and my worse Portuguese. With its massive battlements and cannons, the 16th-century edifice reminded me of forts in Latin America and the Caribbean. We visited the massive cistern beneath the fort, where stairs lead right down into the island’s original source of fresh water, and then the ancient chapel. It had recently been looted, the guide said, showing smashed-open crypts and a small box of bones that remained. Until recently, he said, admission to all of Ilha’s attractions had been free because no one kept watch over them.
I went back to my hotel to get out of the blazing heat, and that’s where I found Harry. He offered to show me the rest of the island, and so began a whirlwind tour that included mosques, churches, a Hindu temple, and waterfront markets that sold fresh fish and cheap polyester shirts. Harry took me to the governor’s palace, where I again paid a small fee, this time to a fully clothed individual. The palace shows the influences of a rich city along the trade routes of India and the Middle East: arabesque floor tiles, etchings of Shakespeare scenes from the 1790’s, four-poster beds, arched passageways, a music room and ballroom, and, in the kitchen, old mortars and pestles beside an electric cake mixer.
Ilha’s narrow streets often open up suddenly into small squares and green space. But everywhere this leftover design rubs against African life. Ancient buildings find use as satellite-dish installations or manioc-flour factories. The most striking case was the hospital, a beautiful building in tragic disrepair. A whitewashed, winged behemoth that resembles an early version of the U.S. Capitol, sans dome, its paint peeling, its windows shattered, its grounds dilapidated. What kind of medical care it can offer is unclear, but some people have put its walls to good use as buttresses for their cane shacks.
Harry and I ate matapa, a traditional stewlike lunch of peanuts and cassava, at the island’s central market, then headed for the main beach, near the hotel and across from the sandy football pitch where kids played games in shiny green uniforms. On the leeward side of the island, away from the Indian Ocean, the water is calm and shallow. I waded into the bathtub-warm water, occasionally kicking a large roof tile buried in the sand. These red tiles were stamped “Marseille,” and I have no reason to doubt that’s where they came from. On the way back to the hotel, teens tried to sell me ancient coins—many from the 19th century—along with what looked like very low-grade pot.
The Omuhipiti is the island’s only formal hotel, but lodges, hostels, and bed-and-breakfasts abound. (The island also has one Internet café, one ATM and, reportedly, one disco.) The restaurants often feel like Victorian taverns, but the chefs cook up amazing spicy squid and shrimp curries. The hostess at one waterside restaurant let me borrow a CD by Zimbabwean artist Olive Mtukudzi after I heard it on their stereo system.
At night, huge bats come out and several houses become ad hoc cinemas, showing movies on small TVs to a large audience, the video’s box dangling from a string as a marquee. Three kids chased me after I checked out one such theater—and when I realized they just wanted the entrance fee, I gave it to them. A nickel apiece.
The next day, after I failed to reach São Lourenço, I decided some umbrella-shaded beach time was in order. Not much to my surprise, I had the white sand all to myself.
LOWDOWN
Ilha de Moçambique is a two-hour drive (or slightly longer bus ride) from Nampula, Mozambique. Flights are available to Nampula from Maputo, the capital, and other cities large enough to sustain airports. Lodging (and great food) is available at bed-breakfast-restaurants Reliquias (+258-26-610092) and Escondidinho (+258-26-610078) for about $37.50 a night. For a splurge, try the full-service hotel Omuhipiti (+258-26-610101;
mozaictravel.com/viewlodge.cfm?ID=52) which runs about 3 million metical a night, or $150.
Mozambique: My Own Private Ilha