Colonial Town Centre

Porto Amboim's town centre retains a cluster of Portuguese colonial buildings — simple one- and two-storey structures with wide verandahs, louvred shutters, and terracotta roofs — that date from the height of the colonial period in the mid-twentieth century. They are not grand; this was never a major colonial town. But they are intact enough to give the place character and to distinguish it from Angola's newer, more generic construction.

The main square and the streets around the old market are the best area to explore on foot. The market itself is a good place to buy fresh fish — catches land on the beach each morning and the catch reaches the market stalls within the hour. This is an ordinary working town, and wandering it is more interesting for that reason.

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A story
Porto Amboim was an active port during the Portuguese colonial era, exporting coffee, cotton, and fish from the interior. The town's modest but intact collection of colonial-era buildings — Portuguese administrative architecture at its most workmanlike — survived the civil war better than many Angolan towns, giving it an unusually complete sense of what these coastal trading posts looked like in the mid-twentieth century.

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