Bissau Velho, the old town everyone has left

Guinea-Bissau has one tourist attraction, and when we walked into it there
was almost nobody there.

Bissau Velho is what Portugal left behind, and it is going quietly to pieces.
A grid of colonial buildings a few streets deep, ochre and pink and pale
green, with iron balconies, long shutters and render coming away in sheets.
Nothing in it has been preserved. The only stretch anyone is putting back
together is the road around the main hotel; everywhere else the quarter is
simply being left to do what it is doing.

It still reads like an old European town at dusk – one lifted up and set
down on the West African coast. Palms lean over packed red dirt. A panel of
blue-and-white tiles survives on one wall, a harvest scene, the sort of thing
you would walk past in Lisbon without turning your head.

What it does not have is people. We arrived in the last hour of light and
passed a handful of them: a few children, one or two cars, somebody crossing
at the far end of a street. Nothing is arranged for visitors, because
visitors are not really a category here.

The city is not empty, though. It is simply somewhere else. Bissau has two
halves and the other one is the market – lines of small shops and stalls and
crowds, a few minutes away and an entire world from the quiet facades. See
only the old town and you will think you have found a ghost. See only the
market and you will never know the ghost is there.

Down at the waterfront the tide was out, and the long painted boats were
sitting over on mud instead of water.

The one moment the city paid us any attention was up by the Presidential
Palace. We raised a Lithuanian flag to take a photograph, and officers
appeared quickly enough to make it clear this was not the place for it. We
put the flag away, and went back to being ignored – which, in a capital, is
its own kind of welcome.