Vilanculos casa with archipelago views

Vilanculos looks out over one of the most photographed stretches of water in Africa: the shallow turquoise channel between the mainland and the Bazaruto Archipelago, where orange dunes rise out of white sandbanks and dhows sail across water that seems lit from below. The town is a sprawling, sandy, friendly place of markets, dive shops, small lodges and a growing community of South African and European owners. This three-bedroom casa sits on a slight rise about four hundred metres back from the beach, with archipelago views from the verandah.

The house is a solid rendered breeze-block build of roughly 110 square metres with a corrugated roof and — the best feature — a twelve-metre covered verandah running the full length of the seaward side. Inside are three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen and an open living room, all with polished concrete or ceramic floors and ceiling fans. Water is from a borehole with a header tank, power is grid with a solar and battery backup, and cooking is on gas. The plot is around 800 square metres, walled, planted with coconut, cashew and papaya, with a shaded parking bay and staff quarters at the rear.

As everywhere in Mozambique, land itself is state-owned and what transfers is the structure together with the DUAT — a renewable long-term use right, usually fifty years. Foreign buyers do this routinely in Vilanculos, but the paperwork must be verified locally: confirm the DUAT is current, correctly mapped, in the seller's name and registered with the municipality. A Mozambican lawyer and a registered surveyor between them make this a manageable process. Prices remain remarkably low for the setting.

The town has the practical basics: a good market, several supermarkets stocked with South African goods, a bank, a clinic, fuel and hardware. Restaurants range from beach shacks doing crab and prawn matapa to lodge kitchens with wine lists. The airport, ten minutes out of town, runs direct flights to Johannesburg and Maputo, which is the reason Vilanculos has developed the way it has. The road north from Maputo is tarred the whole way, if long.

The water is the whole story. Bazaruto and Benguerra islands, a national park, sit an hour offshore by dhow or twenty minutes by speedboat: sandbanks that appear and vanish with the tide, coral reefs, dugong in the seagrass and some of the best fly fishing flats in the Indian Ocean. Closer in, the bay is shallow, warm and safe for swimming, with kitesurfing in the trade wind season from April to September. Snorkelling at Two Mile Reef, diving at Ponta Dundo, dhow sunset cruises and horse riding on the sand fill the rest of the week.