🇲🇬 Madagascar
Antananarivo
Antananarivo (Tanà — the affectionate abbreviation used by all inhabitants and visitors — population 3.5 million in the metropolitan area, 1.5 million in the city proper — the capital of Madagascar and the largest city in the Indian Ocean island world) is one of the most dramatically situated and architecturally distinctive African capitals: a city built across and between twelve sacred hills (the Rova of Antananarivo — the royal palace complex on the highest hill (1,466m above sea level — the "City of a Thousand Warriors" in the original Merina language), the historical wooden royal palaces (the Rova, the palace complex of the Merina Kingdom that ruled Madagascar from the 17th century until the French colonial conquest in 1895), the vazimba lowland rice paddies visible from the hilltop palaces, and the terraced hillside quarters (the quarters of Antananarivo are built on concentric terraces carved into the volcanic laterite hillsides — the most unusual urban topography in Africa). Madagascar is the world's fourth-largest island (587,000 km² — larger than France) and one of the most biodiverse places on Earth: 90% of the island's plant and animal species are found nowhere else in the world (the lemurs (the prosimian primates endemic to Madagascar — the island separated from Africa 160 million years ago before the higher primates evolved, allowing the lemurs to develop without competition from monkeys or apes: today 100+ species of lemur survive in Madagascar, from the tiny 30g mouse lemur (the world's smallest primate) to the 7kg indri (the black-and-white lemur whose haunting territorial call is the most distinctive sound in the Madagascar rainforest)), the baobab trees (the "upside-down trees" whose swollen water-storing trunks are the most distinctive trees in the Malagasy landscape) and the chameleons (half of all the world's chameleon species are endemic to Madagascar)). The Merina people (the dominant ethnic group of the central plateau — the highlands where Antananarivo sits) have one of the most distinctive and complex cultural traditions in Africa: the famadihana (the "turning of the bones" — the Malagasy ancestor worship ceremony where the remains of the dead are exhumed, rewrapped in fresh burial cloths (silk shrouds) and carried around the tomb to music and dancing before being returned: the most extraordinary mortuary tradition in the world outside of Tibetan sky burials).