South Sulawesi's seafront city — fort walls and coto broth
Makassar is the gateway to East Indonesia — a port city with a Dutch fort on its waterfront and some of the most distinctive food in the archipelago: coto makassar (beef offal soup slow-cooked with peanuts), konro (spare rib soup with black kluwek nut), and mie titi (crispy noodles smothered in thick gravy). The fish market at Paotere sees boats unloading their catch before dawn, and the sunsets over Losari Beach draw the whole city to the seafront every evening.
Makassar (historically Ujung Pandang) was the most important port in the Eastern Indonesian spice trade by the early 17th century, where Bugis and Makassarese traders competed with Dutch, Portuguese, and English merchants for control of the nutmeg and clove routes. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) finally captured the city in 1669 after a brutal war against Sultan Hasanuddin — building Fort Rotterdam on the ruins of an earlier Makassarese fort — and Makassar remained the VOC's eastern trade headquarters until the company collapsed in 1799.