The official capital Benin forgot — Dahomey palaces, vodoun shrines and lake villages
Porto-Novo is the constitutional capital of Benin, though almost everyone lives and works in Cotonou 30km down the coast. But Porto-Novo is where Benin's history lives — the former capital of the Kingdom of Porto-Novo, a city of crumbling Brazilian colonial mansions (built by freed slaves who returned from Brazil in the 19th century), vodoun temples with effigies of Legba and Mami Wata on every street corner, and the ethnographic museum of the Daagbo Hounon, Benin's supreme vodoun priest. The nearby lake village of Ganvié — 20,000 people living in stilt houses on Lake Nokoué — is one of West…
Porto-Novo was the capital of the Kingdom of Porto-Novo, a Yoruba successor state that grew wealthy through the slave trade in the 17th–19th centuries. The Portuguese presence (the city's name means 'new port' in Portuguese) dates to the 15th century, making it one of the oldest continuously inhabited colonial settlements in West Africa. It became the capital of French Dahomey in 1900 and remained the nominal capital after independence in 1960, though the government seat effectively moved to the larger, busier port city of Cotonou. The Brazilian colonial architecture — built by Afro-Brazilian…