Madagascar
A continent of its own off the African coast
Madagascar is the world's fourth-largest island and one of the strangest places alive, a fragment of ancient Gondwana that drifted into the Indian Ocean and evolved in isolation for tens of millions of years. The result is a natural laboratory where roughly nine in ten species, from lemurs to the baobabs and the chameleons, exist nowhere else on Earth. Its people are equally singular, descended from Austronesian seafarers who crossed the ocean from Borneo and mixed with African and Arab arrivals, giving the island a culture and a language unlike any on the nearby mainland.
A spine of highlands runs down the island's length, peaking at Maromokotro, 2,876 meters, in the northern Tsaratanana massif. The eastern escarpment catches monsoon rains that feed remnant rainforests, while the west and south grow progressively drier into spiny forest and grassland. Centuries of slash-and-burn farming have stripped much of the original forest, exposing the red lateritic soils that bleed into rivers and give Madagascar its nickname as the great red island. Distinct ecosystems, from the limestone tsingy pinnacles to the avenue of giant baobabs, make it one of the planet's top biodiversity hotspots.
Settled little more than two thousand years ago, the island was unified in the nineteenth century under the Merina kingdom centered on Antananarivo before France made it a colony in 1896. Independence came in 1960, followed by decades of political instability and economic struggle that have left it among the world's poorest nations despite its riches. Most Malagasy farm rice, the dietary and cultural staple, and venerate their ancestors through the famuns and reburial ceremonies of the highlands. Vanilla, of which Madagascar is the world's leading producer, cloves, and tourism anchored on the island's wildlife are mainstays of the economy.