The Tour de l'Échangeur -- sometimes called the Limete Tower -- is one of Kinshasa's strangest landmarks: a tall unfinished tower block in the Limete district that has been under intermittent construction since the 1970s and never completed. It is visible from a remarkable distance across the flat city, an accidental monument to the aspirations and frustrations of development in the DRC. Work has started and stopped on it multiple times over the decades, and its skeletal concrete frame has become part of the landscape.
The tower is best appreciated from a distance, as part of the city's panorama rather than as a destination in itself. From certain points in the city you can see it rising above the lower buildings of Limete -- a reminder that Kinshasa has been in a permanent state of becoming for as long as anyone can remember. It is the kind of detail that stays with you, and that says something true about the city that no official monument quite captures.