Madagascar's dry coast — baobabs, reefs, and Vezo fishermen
Toliara (Tuléar) is the gateway to Madagascar's sun-scorched southwest — a languid port city on the edge of the Mozambique Channel where Vezo fishermen launch outrigger canoes at dawn, the coral reef at Anakao shelters spinner dolphins, and the Spiny Forest inland bristles with otherworldly cactus-like succulents found nowhere else on Earth. The nearby Avenue of the Baobabs is just a day's drive north.
Toliara was established as a French colonial port in the late 19th century, becoming the administrative capital of the southern region under the Gouvernement Général de Madagascar. Before French annexation, the region was the homeland of the Vezo people — semi-nomadic sea-going fishermen who define themselves not by ancestry but by the act of fishing, making them among the most ocean-identified cultures in the world. The southwestern dry zone's extraordinary biodiversity (90% endemic species in the Spiny Forest) is the result of Madagascar's 90-million-year isolation from Africa and India, an…