Moçâmedes is a

city A city is a human settlement of a substantial size. The term "city" has different meanings around the world and in some places the settlement can be very small. Even where the term is limited to larger settlements, there is no universally agree ...

in southwestern

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 ...

, and the capital of

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 ...

. The city's current population is 255,000 (2014 census). Founded in 1840 by the Portuguese colonial administration, the city was named Namibe between 1985 and 2016. Moçâmedes has a cool dry climate and desert vegetation, because it is near the

Namib Desert The Namib ( ; ) is a coastal desert in Southern Africa. According to the broadest definition, the Namib stretches for more than along the Atlantic coasts of Angola, Namibia, and northwest South Africa, extending southward from the Carunjamba Ri ...

History

The area was first explored by the Portuguese in 1785 and claimed for Portugal by

Luís Cândido Cordeiro Pinheiro Furtado Luis is a given name. It is the Spanish form of the originally Germanic name or . Other Iberian Romance languages have comparable forms: (with an accent mark on the i) in Portuguese and Galician, in Aragonese and Catalan, while is archaic ...

, who had been sent there in the frigate ''Loanda'' by the then governor-general of Angola, Baron Moçâmedes (Portuguese: ''Barão de Mossâmedes''), who also sent an overland expedition headed by Gregório José Mendes to rendezvous with Furtado. They renamed the bay Moçâmedes in honour of the baron. In 1839 the then governor-general of Angola, Admiral Noronha, sent a fresh expedition to subdue the local chiefs and make them vassals of Portugal. Moçâmedes was officially founded in 1840 by the Portuguese colonial administration on a bay that the Portuguese originally called ''Angra do Negro'' by order of Portuguese prime minister, the Count of Bonfim, who was also head of the Colonial Department. In 1840 a factory was established and in July of the same year a fort was built at Ponta Negra. The area was colonized mainly by Portuguese settlers from

Madeira Madeira ( ; ), officially the Autonomous Region of Madeira (), is an autonomous Regions of Portugal, autonomous region of Portugal. It is an archipelago situated in the North Atlantic Ocean, in the region of Macaronesia, just under north of ...

and

Brazil Brazil, officially the Federative Republic of Brazil, is the largest country in South America. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by area, fifth-largest country by area and the List of countries and dependencies by population ...

; in the 1850s the Portuguese government also gave sea passage and financial assistance to a large number of German colonists. The village grew as a fishing port and by the 1960s it had 143 fishing boats and several fish processing factories. The port soon ranked alongside other important fishing ports such as

Luanda Luanda ( ) is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Angola, largest city of Angola. It is Angola's primary port, and its major industrial, cultural and urban centre. Located on Angola's northern Atlantic coast, Luanda is Ang ...

Benguela Benguela (; Umbundu: Luombaka) is a city in western Angola, capital of Benguela Province. Benguela is one of Angola's most populous cities with a population of 555,124 in the city and 561,775 in the municipality, at the 2014 census. History Por ...

and

Lobito Lobito is a municipality in Angola. It is located in Benguela Province, on the Atlantic Coast north of the Catumbela Estuary. The Lobito municipality had a population of 393,079 in 2014. History The city was founded in 1843 and owes its existe ...

. About 200 km from the city of Moçâmedes the Portuguese authorities founded the

Iona National Park Iona National Park ( Portuguese: ) is the largest and oldest national park in Angola. It is situated in the Southwestern corner of the country, in Namibe Province. It is roughly bound by the Atlantic Ocean to the West, an escarpment to the East ...

, Angola's oldest and largest national park, proclaimed as a reserve in 1937 and upgraded to a national park covering 15,150 km² in 1964.

Climate

Moçâmedes has a

hot desert climate The desert climate or arid climate (in the Köppen climate classification ''BWh'' and ''BWk'') is a dry climate sub-type in which there is a severe excess of evaporation over precipitation. The typically bald, rocky, or sandy surfaces in desert ...

(

Köppen climate classification The Köppen climate classification divides Earth climates into five main climate groups, with each group being divided based on patterns of seasonal precipitation and temperature. The five main groups are ''A'' (tropical), ''B'' (arid), ''C'' (te ...

''BWh''). Despite being well north of the

Tropic of Capricorn The Tropic of Capricorn (or the Southern Tropic) is the circle of latitude that contains the subsolar point at the December (or southern) solstice. It is thus the southernmost latitude where the Sun can be seen directly overhead. It also reach ...

on the Atlantic Coast, the climate is subtropical due to the cooling effect of the northward-flowing

Benguela Current The Benguela Current is the broad, northward flowing ocean current that forms the eastern portion of the South Atlantic Ocean gyre. The current extends from roughly Cape Point in the south, to the position of the Angola-Benguela Front in the no ...

causing July and August to be below 18 °C.

Economy

During 1966-67 a major

iron ore Iron ores are rocks and minerals from which metallic iron can be economically extracted. The ores are usually rich in iron oxides and vary in color from dark grey, bright yellow, or deep purple to rusty red. The iron is usually found in the f ...

terminal was built at Saco, the bay 12 km north of Moçâmedes, to serve the iron ore mine inland at Cassinga. Construction of the mine installations and a 300 km railway were commissioned to

Krupp Friedrich Krupp AG Hoesch-Krupp (formerly Fried. Krupp AG and Friedrich Krupp GmbH), trade name, trading as Krupp, was the largest company in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century as well as Germany's premier weapons manufacturer dur ...

of Germany and the modern harbour terminal to SETH, a Portuguese company owned by Højgaard & Schultz of Denmark. Within one year the first 250,000 ton ore carrier docked and loaded with ore in 1967.

Culture

Religion

The city's Sé Catedral de São Pedro is the

cathedral A cathedral is a church (building), church that contains the of a bishop, thus serving as the central church of a diocese, Annual conferences within Methodism, conference, or episcopate. Churches with the function of "cathedral" are usually s ...

episcopal see of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Namibe, which was established in 2009 on territory split from its Metropolitan's Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Lubango, to which it is a

suffragan diocese A suffragan diocese is one of the dioceses other than the metropolitan archdiocese that constitute an ecclesiastical province. It exists in some Christian denominations, in particular the Catholic Church, the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandr ...

Sports

In 2013, Moçâmedes, then called Namibe, and the national capital

jointly hosted the

2013 FIRS Men's Roller Hockey World Cup The 2013 FIRS Men's Roller Hockey World Cup was the 41st edition of the FIRS Roller Hockey World Cup. It was held in Luanda and Namibe (today Moçâmedes), Angola from 20 to 28 September 2013. This is the first Roller Hockey World Cup organized ...

, the first time that a World Cup of

roller hockey Roller hockey is a form of hockey played on a dry surface using wheeled skates. It can be played with traditional roller skates (quad skates) or with inline skates and use either a ball or puck. Combined, roller hockey is played in nearly 60 cou ...

was held in Africa.

Transport

Rail

Moçâmedes is the terminus of the

Moçâmedes Railway The Moçâmedes Railway () is an 860 km railway line in Angola, between Moçâmedes and Menongue. The line is operated by the company Caminhos de Ferro de Moçâmedes E.P. The port city of Moçâmedes was renamed Namibe between 1985 and 2016 ...

. This line was originally 600mm gauge but was converted to 1067mm gauge in the 1950s.

Sea

It has one of Angola's three major

ports Ports collections (or ports trees, or just ports) are the sets of makefiles and Patch (Unix), patches provided by the BSD-based operating systems, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, as a simple method of installing software or creating binary packages. T ...

, alongside

and

Air

Moçâmedes is served by the Namibe Airport located about 7 km to the south of the city. The old

Yuri Gagarin Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin; Gagarin's first name is sometimes transliterated as ''Yuriy'', ''Youri'', or ''Yury''. (9 March 1934 – 27 March 1968) was a Soviet pilot and cosmonaut who, aboard the first successful Human spaceflight, crewed sp ...

airport, only about 1.7 km from the city's center, connects the city to the rest of the country.

References

Bibliography

* Clarence-Smith, W. G. Slaves, Peasants and Capitalists in Southern Angola 1840–1926. New York: Cambridge UP, 1979. * Clarence-Smith, W. G. "Slavery in Coastal Southern Angola, 1875-1913." Journal of Southern African Studies 2.2 (1976), 214–23.

External links

The Catholic diocese, with episcopal incumbent biographies
at GigaCatholic {{Authority control Populated coastal places in Angola Ports and harbours of Angola Municipalities of Angola Namibe Province Provincial capitals in Angola Populated places established in 1840 1840 establishments in the Portuguese Empire