Overview
The capital that tourism forgot, and is now inviting back
Luanda was founded by the Portuguese in 1576 and for three centuries was one of the largest slave ports in the Atlantic world; it became the capital of an independent Angola in 1975, lived through twenty-seven years of civil war that ended only in 2002, and then through an oil boom that for a time made it the most expensive city on earth for a foreigner to live in. What that history has left is a place of sharp contrasts: a seventeenth-century fort and pink colonial palaces on the hill, a wall of new towers along the bay, a rocket-shaped mausoleum on the shore, and beyond them the musseques, the informal neighbourhoods where most of the city lives and where kuduro was born.
For decades almost nobody came for pleasure, because a visa took weeks and a hotel room cost more than in London. Both have changed. Since late 2023 citizens of 98 countries, including most of Europe, the United States, Britain and Brazil, enter without a tourist visa; the kwanza has lost most of its value against the dollar, so prices have fallen to merely high; and a vast new international airport has replaced the old one in the city. Luanda is still not an easy destination. It is hot, congested and needs care after dark, and little is signposted or priced for visitors. It is also warm, musical, sure of itself and unlike anywhere else on the continent.
Give the city two days: the fortress and the old town, the Marginal at sunset, a museum, and an afternoon that turns into a night on the Ilha. Give the coast to the south one or two more: the slavery museum, the cliffs of Miradouro da Lua, the Kwanza river and the Kissama park fit into one long day with a driver, and Cabo Ledo's beach is the place to stay the night. The waterfalls at Kalandula need two days more.
