mozambique: fascinating architecture

one of the first things that struck us in maputo was the architecture. even little houses out in the country are painted pretty colors, or beautifully woven from reed mats. the people seem to have a real taste for aesthetics. exhibit a: this random house we walked by. no sign or anything to explain what its about.

exhibit b: lamp posts at city hall building.

we will start off with perhaps the most famous name: gustave eiffel. yes, the chap who designed the eiffel tower. among his many works are some you may have heard of, like the statue of liberty. and the slightly less famous casa de ferro in maputo. this house was designed for the governor, but mr. eiffel never actually having set foot in maputo neglected to think about the small detail of the inside temperature of a house made entirely of iron in a tropical country. so the governor never actually lived in it.

another chap by the name of herbert baker designed the hotel polana - a hotel which remained open all during the civil war here in mozambique. this was a guy so prolific, that among the things he designed are: the government buildings in pretoria, south africa, rhodes house in oxford, the bank of england, one of the stands at lords cricket grounds in england, new delhi (no that is not a typo) and.....wait for it....the law courts, state house and nairobi school in kenya. anyway, i digress. here is his hotel....

there is also a beautiful garden in the center of maputo, designed around the 1880s. sandi and i have had lunch here a couple times. once nearby we struggled to find a bakery and in our broken 2 words that we know of portuguese stopped a young lady and asked for 'pao'. she looked at us like we were idiots and pointed wordlessly at the bakery across the street.

and finally, maputos pièce de résistance, the building rated by newsweek as the '7th most beautiful railway station in the world'. almost 100 years old, this is not a large station but is it ever pretty...

they still have a few trains running but not many.

its said the designers (one with the awesome name alfredo augusto lisboa de lima, and his more boring friends mario veiga and ferreira da costa) were friends of eiffel, but i was unable to find proof of this.