During the first part of our visit we were told we’d be going to the Grand Hotel. Curiously no-one said ‘let’s go for a coffee’ or ‘you’ll get a good meal there’ and I found this lacuna puzzling.
It turned out that the Grand Hotel was constructed by the Portuguese as an opulent art-deco style sea-side holiday venue. It sported 120 palatial rooms and an Olympic sized swimming pool, but it never made money. So during the Mozambican civil war it became the headquarters of one of the rival factions. However, when they left they disabled the building, cutting off the water and power supplies and pouring concrete down the toilets. It was abandoned as an empty shell. Since then the poor and marginalised of Beira have adopted it to create informal dwellings and it is now the world’s most architecturally significant, and notorious, vertical slums.
We never had that coffee.
