Madagascar's highland spa town — pousse-pousse rickshaws, sapphire dealers, and a Norwegian thermal springs legacy
Antsirabe is Madagascar's third city and its most comfortable highland town, sitting at 1,500m in the Central Highlands 169km south of Antananarivo. The altitude keeps temperatures cool year-round and the town has a distinctly different character from Madagascar's other cities: wide avenues, a railway station, and the thermal baths that Norwegian Lutheran missionaries established here in the 1870s to take advantage of the volcanic springs give it an almost European spa-town feel. The pousse-pousse (man-powered rickshaw) is the signature local transport — a fleet of elaborately decorated hand-…
Antsirabe's modern character was shaped almost entirely by Norwegian Lutheran missionaries who arrived in the 1870s and established a medical mission and thermal baths at the springs area (Ranomafana means 'hot water' in Malagasy). The missionaries' influence explains the unusually European street layout, the Lutheran churches, and the relatively high literacy rate of the central highlands population. The French colonial administration extended a railway to Antsirabe in 1923, consolidating its role as the highland agricultural hub — the surrounding countryside produces rice, vegetables, potat…