Quelimane

Quelimane, city in central Mozambique, capital of Zambézia province. Quelimane is located 25 km (16 mi) from the Indian Ocean along the Rio dos Bons Sinais, 110 km (70 mi) northeast of the mouth of the Zambezi River. It is a minor port and home to a fleet of shrimp-fishing boats. It has an airport with regular domestic flights, a 146-km (91-mi) long rail line to Mocuba, and road connections to Nampula, the Zambezi valley, and southern Malawi. Quelimane contains many buildings and monuments that reflect its Portuguese colonial past.

Quelimane was founded in the 15th century as a Swahili trading city, linking gold and ivory producing states in the African interior, especially Great Zimbabwe of the Karanga people, to the Indian Ocean trade network. Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama landed in Quelimane on his way to India in 1498. More than 400 years of continuous, although often tenuous, Portuguese occupation began in 1544. Quelimane was Portugal's favored staging point for trade and conquest along the Zambezi valley. Starting in the 16th century, Portugal leased large tracts of the area surrounding Quelimane to prazeros, expatriate settlers who exercised virtually unrestrained control over local populations and resources.

From the late 18th century until abolition in 1875, Quelimane became a major port in the slave trade, sending up to 10,000 slaves annually to Brazil, Cuba, Zanzibar, and Réunion. It was a flourishing administrative and commercial center during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, serving large company-owned plantations that produced coconut, cotton, sugar, oilseeds, tea, and rice. Quelimane continued to develop as a regional administrative and commercial center, processing and shipping agricultural produce from the surrounding region. The departure of settlers at the time of Mozambique's independence in 1975 and the prolonged antigovernment insurrection during the 1980s accelerated the economic decline of the city and its surroundings. Population growth increased through refugee migration. Population (1997) 153,187.