Luanda
Angola's capital and oil-rich Atlantic port
Luanda strings along a curving Atlantic bay on Angola's northern coast, the capital and by far the largest city of a country made wealthy and unequal by oil. Its metropolitan area has swelled past ten million as people poured in during and after decades of civil war, making it one of the fastest-growing and, for expatriates, famously one of the most expensive cities in the world. Glass towers raised on petroleum money rise behind a palm-lined seafront promenade, while vast self-built musseque neighborhoods spread inland — a study in the extremes of contemporary African urbanization.
The city sits on a low coastal plain backed by modest bluffs, facing a long sandy spit called the Ilha that shelters its harbor and lines the bay with beaches and restaurants. The climate is hot and dry, cooled by the cold Benguela Current sweeping up from the south, which keeps rainfall sparse despite the tropical latitude. The renovated Marginal waterfront curves around the bay as Luanda's showpiece, while the deepwater port — the busiest in Angola — handles the oil exports and imported goods on which the city's economy turns.
Portuguese explorer Paulo Dias de Novais founded Luanda in 1576 as São Paulo da Assunção de Loanda, and for centuries it was a principal Atlantic port of the Portuguese empire and a center of the slave trade to Brazil. It became the capital of independent Angola in 1975, just as a long civil war erupted that drove waves of migrants into the relative safety of the city. Since the war ended in 2002, oil revenue has fueled a building boom and a sharp divide between wealth and poverty, leaving Luanda the booming, unequal heart of one of southern Africa's major economies.