Nestled in the estuary of the Rio Geba, equidistant from the country's northern and southern borders, Bissau is a pleasant, festive capital on a human scale, surrounded by rice paddies. Whether you're arriving from Conakry or, a fortiori, Dakar, you'll feel a sense of slowing down, a sense of appeasement doubled for the eye by a chromatic kaleidoscope: the azure blue of its clouds of cabs with white-painted roofs, the pastel pink, yellow or ochre of the downtown facades. The capital is horizontal, a city of continuity: detached single-family homes with overhanging four-slope roofs, each embellished with a garden and a veranda, usually screened. It also has its daring features: cubes or villas with curved walls and roof terraces. The Portuguese architectural heritage, which makes up almost all the buildings in the city center, makes it the most Mediterranean of West African capitals. It's a heritage that's also rather decrepit, as if the modest villas were clothes too big and expensive to maintain, and we're reminded that the city has experienced civil war and chronic instability, flirting with numerous coups d'état that often topple its history and prevent it from having a stable politics. Bissau is also a port city, and its port is of particular importance in the history of the country and its liberation: it was here, in the port of Pidjiguiti, where fifty dockworkers demonstrating for a pay rise in 1956 were massacred, that the shockwave started that led Amilcar Cabral and members of his party to go underground. Fifteen years and a number of defeats later, it was the Lisbon dictatorship that paid the price and was deposed by a group of officers returning from Guinea... But today, Bissau is a city that would like to turn the page and is looking for a future; its most beautiful event is not a commemoration but a celebration: "O Carnaval anual de Bissau".. This colorful carnival sees all the country's ethnic groups come out to dance and parade, their bodies oiled or smeared with mud, their faces masked or made-up, for a four-day festival that makes you realize just how young and cheerful Bissau is, that it deserves better than to be a backdrop for coups d'état, and that it wouldn't take much for this little forgotten capital to give lessons in savoir-vivre and nonchalant beauty to Dakar or Conakry.

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Vaisselle faite de calebasses au marché Ismaël Schwartz - Iconotec
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