The Tigres Strait, formerly known as Tigres Bay or Great Fish Bay, is a strait in
Angola
Angola, officially the Republic of Angola, is a country on the west-Central Africa, central coast of Southern Africa. It is the second-largest Portuguese-speaking world, Portuguese-speaking (Lusophone) country in both total area and List of c ...
, located in
Namibe Province
Namibe Province is a Provinces of Angola, province of Angola. Under Portuguese Angola, Portuguese rule it was the Moçâmedes District. It has an area of 57,091 km2 and had a 2014 census population of 495,326. The port and city of Namibe, Mo ...
, serving as a separation between the Angolan mainland and the
Tigres Island.
Geography
It once had a small peninsula on its eastern side, with its
isthmus
An isthmus (; : isthmuses or isthmi) is a narrow piece of land connecting two larger areas across an expanse of water by which they are otherwise separated. A tombolo is an isthmus that consists of a spit or bar, and a strait is the sea count ...
in the south and a well established fishing village named
Saint Martin of the Tigers (in Portuguese: ''São Martinho dos Tigres''). The ocean broke through the isthmus of the peninsula in 1962 and the water line was severed.
Tigres became an island overnight,
Tigres Island, the largest island of Angola.
Currently, most of the area of the former bay has become a
strait
A strait is a water body connecting two seas or water basins. The surface water is, for the most part, at the same elevation on both sides and flows through the strait in both directions, even though the topography generally constricts the ...
between the island and the mainland. Of the original bay, only a small
inlet
An inlet is a typically long and narrow indentation of a shoreline such as a small arm, cove, bay, sound, fjord, lagoon or marsh, that leads to an enclosed larger body of water such as a lake, estuary, gulf or marginal sea.
Overview
In ...
open to the north —the ''Saco dos Tigres''— remains at the southern end.
History
On 6 December 1904 the Russian fleet proceeding to the pacific to fight the
Battle of Tsushima
The Battle of Tsushima (, ''Tsusimskoye srazheniye''), also known in Japan as the , was the final naval battle of the Russo-Japanese War, fought on 27–28 May 1905 in the Tsushima Strait. A devastating defeat for the Imperial Russian Navy, the ...
of stopped at the bay to take on coal.
They left the following afternoon.
The British
HMS Barrosa arrived the next day looking for the fleet before heading to
Moçâmedes.
See also
*
Geography of Angola
Geography (from Ancient Greek ; combining 'Earth' and 'write', literally 'Earth writing') is the study of the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth. Geography is an all-encompassing discipline that seeks an understanding o ...
References
Straits of the Atlantic Ocean
Bays of Angola
Straits of Africa
{{angola-geo-stub