Maputo Art & Architecture Walk

Pancho Guedes

Amâncio d'Alpoim Miranda Guedes, known to everyone as Pancho, built more than twenty-five years of buildings in this city between the 1950s and independence, and almost nothing he made looks like anything else. He called his own manner Stiloguedes. He put sculpture into structure, painted his façades, bent his roofs, and treated a block of flats as a place to have an idea. The Smiling Lion apartment building is the one most people photograph, with its face and its gaping mouth over the entrance, but the pleasure of this walk is coming across a bakery or a school of his without expecting it.

Two Iron Buildings, and a Correction

Casa de Ferro, the iron house, was prefabricated in Europe and assembled here in the 1890s, and it is genuinely attributed to Gustave Eiffel's studio. It was intended as the governor's residence, which turned out to be a poor idea in this climate: a metal house in Maputo is an oven, and nobody lived in it for long.

The Railway Station is the one everybody credits to Eiffel, and he had nothing to do with it. It was designed by Portuguese architects and completed in 1916, and the dome that gets him the credit was simply built in the idiom of the age. It remains one of the most beautiful stations anywhere, and the bar on the platform is a fine place to sit.

Núcleo de Arte

Founded in 1936, this is the oldest artists' collective in Mozambique and still a working set of studios rather than a gallery with a shop attached. Artists are usually there, usually willing to talk, and the work is for sale directly. It is also where the Transforming Arms into Tools project made its sculptures: after the civil war, weapons handed in under a disarmament programme were cut up and given to artists, and what they made from them travelled the world, including a throne assembled from rifles that now sits in the British Museum.

Malangatana

Malangatana Ngwenya is the painter Mozambique is known for, and his work is on public walls around the city as well as in the National Art Museum. His canvases are crowded, violent and warm at the same time, and they are the clearest record of what this country went through in the second half of the last century.

Where to Finish

FEIMA, the craft and flower market in Polana, is the right last stop: capulanas, carving, and basketwork bought from the person who made it, under trees, with somewhere to sit down.