Island of Mozambique
— — the white town the Indian Ocean keeps.
Not only on a wall.
“The narrow island at the mouth of Mossuril Bay, three kilometres long and barely five hundred metres wide. Stone Town on the north end, Macuti Town with its palm-thatch roofs to the south. A causeway carries the road in from the mainland. The fort at the tip has held the wind off the ocean for four hundred years, and the lime-washed walls still take the late light the way they did when ships waited in the channel.
Island of Mozambique, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Ilha de Moçambique sits in the Mozambique Channel off the coast of Nampula Province, joined to the mainland by a 3.8-kilometre single-lane bridge completed in 1969. The island is roughly three kilometres long and 500 metres at its widest. It served as the Portuguese capital of East Africa from the early sixteenth century until 1898, when the seat moved south to Lourenço Marques. UNESCO inscribed the island as a World Heritage Site in 1991 for its continuous use of the same building techniques across five centuries of Swahili, Arab, Portuguese, and Indian trade.
The Fortaleza de São Sebastião occupies the northern tip of the island. Begun in 1558 and finished by 1620, it is the oldest European building still standing in the southern hemisphere. Coral stone quarried from the surrounding reef forms the curtain walls, two metres thick at the base, with bastions oriented to cover the channel. Inside the fort, the small Chapel of Nossa Senhora de Baluarte, dated to 1522, is held to be the earliest European structure in the southern hemisphere still in its original form.
The island is reached by the EN105 road and the long single-lane bridge from Lumbo on the mainland; cars cross one direction at a time. Stone Town occupies the northern third; the densely lived-in Macuti Town, named for the palm-thatch (macuti) roofs, fills the south. The Palace and Chapel of São Paulo, built in 1610 as a Jesuit college and later the governor's residence, is now a museum. Dry season runs May to October; the channel is calmest then and the heat is workable.