Beira is not a city for tourist sights so much as a city to walk through. The colonial centre, the port, and the long beach all have their atmosphere. Half a day is enough to see the main things at an unhurried pace.
The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Rosary is the city's anchoring monument, built partly from stones of the sixteenth-century Portuguese fort of São Caetano at Sofala. The Beira Railway Station is a fine piece of late colonial architecture and still works as the terminus of the Beira-Bulawayo line. The Macuti Lighthouse and Shipwreck at the northern point is the city's photogenic icon — a rusting ship beached directly in front of a century-old lighthouse. The famously decaying Grande Hotel, once the largest in Africa and now home to several thousand squatters, is at the southern edge of town.