In the colonial period, the capital was called Lourenço Marques but its nickname soon became the “Cannes of South Africans”, as although under the Apartheid government rock music was outlawed in South Africa, Maputo was the “good life” capital with a radio station which was listened to from as far away as Johannesburg.
There are still some artefacts of the past visible today: buildings with baroque and nineteenth-century architecture and a castle wall, the first Portuguese outpost in the sixteenth century. This town represents a fusion between an ancient colonial era and more recent modernity.
