Maputo layers four centuries into a walkable grid: a Portuguese fort over a 1781 stockade, a revolution museum, socialist-era monuments and Mafalala, the shantytown that raised Samora Machel and Eusébio.
Rebuilt in 1867 over a 1781 stockade, the red-brick fort guarded the Delagoa Bay ivory and slave trade. Courtyard sheds hold toppled colonial statues and bronze panels of the 1895 Gungunhana campaign. Tue–Sun 09:00–16:00.
The 1860 ochre-and-white Casa Amarela is the oldest surviving building in the lower city. Its coin rooms run from Indian Ocean trade beads and Zanzibari silver to Kruger ponds, Portuguese escudos and the 1980 metical.
Laid out in 1885 by British gardener Thomas Honney for the Portuguese administration, the gardens hide a mock-Gothic folly, a colonial bandstand and figs planted when Lourenço Marques was still a village of 800 people.
Saturday-rooted craft market on the square where ox wagons once unloaded for the harbour. Makonde ebony masks and Nyau spirit figures carved in the northern tradition sit beside Shona soapstone from across the border.
A star-shaped granite mausoleum ringed by socialist-realist murals of the liberation war. Inside lie Eduardo Mondlane, Josina Machel and Samora Machel, whose 1986 plane crash at Mbuzini still fuels dispute in Mozambique.
The 2011 bronze of Mozambique's first president, arm raised over the square, was cast by North Korea's Mansudae studio — the same workshop behind monuments in Windhoek and Dakar. City Hall and the 1944 cathedral frame it.
Av. 24 de Julho 1008 traces Frelimo from the 1962 founding in Dar es Salaam through the armed struggle to 1975 independence: captured Portuguese weapons, bush-camp photographs, Mondlane's letters and propaganda posters.
The 1910 station with its copper dome and wrought-iron canopies handled gold-mine labour trains to the Rand for decades. The old first-class hall and a stranded 1889 steam locomotive sit under the pastel-green ironwork.
The reed-and-tin quarter built for Africans barred from the cement city raised Samora Machel, footballer Eusébio and poet José Craveirinha. Iverca's local guides open the shebeens, mosques and Craveirinha's family house.
Nuno Craveiro Lopes's 1962 concrete church, known locally as the lemon squeezer, folds into a single fluted cone — the boldest of the late-colonial modernist buildings raised as Lourenço Marques boomed on Rhodesian money.
Av. Ho Chi Min 1233 holds the country's Malangatana collection — his tangled, blood-red canvases of colonial violence and the civil war — alongside Bertina Lopes and Chissano's carved ironwood. Tue–Sun, closed Mondays.
The chugging ferry across the bay was the only link to Catembe until the 2018 suspension bridge opened above it. From mid-channel the whole colonial waterfront lines up: fort, customs house and the Ponta Vermelha cliffs.