Bolama

Bolama was the capital of Portuguese Guinea from 1879 to 1941, which means that everything important to the colonial administration of this territory was once conducted here, on an island that is now reachable by infrequent ferry and contains a population of perhaps seven thousand people, most of whom live in a town that occupies one small corner of an island that history vacated when the colonizers moved their offices north to Bissau. What remains is one of the strangest places I have ever walked — a landscape of architectural ambition that has been surrendering to the tropics for eight decades without anyone able to decide whether to mourn it or simply watch.

I came on a ferry that left Bissau in the early morning and arrived at Bolama’s small dock mid-afternoon, at an hour when the town was deep in the siesta that the heat enforces without exception. The streets were empty. Cats were sleeping in the shade of a wall. A single goat was eating something from the gutter with the purposeful expression of an animal that has found its calling. I walked from the dock into what had once been the administrative center of a colonial territory and found myself moving through a sequence of ruins so complete and so beautiful that I stopped taking notes and started simply standing in front of things.

The former governor’s palace is the centerpiece. It is a large two-story structure that now has no roof and no floors on the upper level and almost no windows, the openings having been colonized by vegetation with the thoroughness of something that took a decision and has never reconsidered it. Ficus roots wrap around the stone columns with the patient grip of something that measures time differently. Inside, the floor is cracked through with grass and fern. The staircase still stands to the upper landing, where there is no floor to step onto, so you climb to the top and look across roofless walls at the sky. The quality of silence inside the building is specific — the kind produced by something large and enclosed that has been abandoned long enough to start belonging to the air again.

There are dozens of other structures in similar states of gentle dissolution — the old customs house, the post office, a row of colonial villas along what was once the main street and that now presents itself as a kind of teaching collection of what happens to ambition when the climate has seven or eight decades to offer its opinion. Between the buildings, the jungle has moved in not aggressively but persistently, so that the town feels less like a ruin and more like a collaboration between two different kinds of time: the time that built things and the time that disassembles them.

The living town coexists with all of this with the matter-of-factness of people who grew up amid ruins and do not experience them as ruins but simply as the neighbourhood. Children play football in the courtyard of what was once the municipal library. Women dry laundry on the walls of the old courthouse. A man I spoke to briefly had converted part of the former customs building into a workshop where he repaired engines. He was proud of the space and pointed out the ceiling, which was still the original colonial tile, intact above him and beginning to sprout moss at the edges. He didn’t seem to notice this, or perhaps he had noticed it long ago and made his peace.

I ate at the only restaurant, which served fish and rice and nothing else and which was operated by a woman who had been doing this for twenty-three years according to the person who told me to go there. The fish had been grilled over wood until the skin was crisp and slightly charred and the inside was still just barely cooked, which is the correct way and the way you almost never get in places where people are trying to please you.

When to go: November through April. Bolama is accessible year-round by ferry from Bissau, but the rains make the roads and ruins less traversable from June through October. The ferry schedule is infrequent and changes seasonally; confirm in Bissau before planning your visit.