This week’s dream: The timeworn islands of Mozambique

“There is no more definitively Mozam-bican place than Ilha de Moçambique,” said Maria Shollenbarger in Travel + Leisure. A 500-year-old fortified island city that commands the entrance to a bay on the nation’s northern coast, Ilha, as locals call it, is, “in the best possible sense of the word, haunted.” Though rapid change is visiting parts of northern Mozambique in the form of a gas and oil boom, many of the islands just offshore have a “frozen-in-amber” quality that makes them singularly attractive vacation retreats. Everywhere you look on Ilha, traces remain of the Arab sultans and Portuguese explorers “who came and went with the trade winds.” More than a century after the decline of Portugal as a global maritime power, the former capital of its East African empire wears an appealing patina of forsaken grandeur.

Stone Town, the Portuguese-built section of the 2-mile-long island, is rustling to life these days. For every long-empty colonial villa, a stately neighbor is being lovingly restored with American or European money, and yet the area remains “magnificent in its half-disintegration.” Here or there, a “subtly stylish” restaurant will serve prawn curries or thin, “improbably tasty” pizzas to visitors who are wandering toward the local museum or to the 1522 Church of Our Lady of the Ramparts, the oldest European church in the Southern Hemisphere.

Farther north, Mozambique’s islands take on more of a castaway feel. Tiny Ibo, which lies a quick bush-plane ride from Pemba, has its own Stone Town of crumbling villas, with streets “long since reclaimed by sand.” But smart hoteliers are reclaiming historic properties across the Quirimbas Archipelago. At Ibo Island Lodge, I stayed in one of two restored villas at the sea’s edge and welcomed a coffee delivered each morning by a barefoot attendant. The coast here is “a place of tidal flats and boundless blue skies,” and the lodge one day carried a few of us by dhow to a broad sandbar that had been temporarily furnished with chairs, umbrellas, and a picnic. Tidal fluctuations are dramatic near Ibo, but until the dhow pulled us aboard just before the sandbar vanished under the waves, the setting felt like our own private paradise.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

At Ilha de Moçambique’s Terraço das Quitandas (terracodasquitandas.com), doubles start at $200.