After years of abandonment, the emblematic Vila Algarve building, in the heart of Maputo, is about to be given a new lease of life. Once used as a detention and torture centre by the International and State Defence Police (PIDE) during the Portuguese colonial regime, the property will now be transformed into a museum-hotel, the Mozambican Government has announced.

According to the award notice seen by the Lusa news agency, the Ministry of Combatants has entrusted the company Giluba-Lin with responsibility for the project of "design, renovation of the building and operation of a museum-hotel in the building known as Vila Algarve".

The work will be carried out in two stages and aims to restore dignity to a building deeply marked by time and history. Currently in an advanced state of decay, the villa, located at the junction of Avenida dos Mártires de Machava and Avenida Ahmed Sekou Touré, was built in 1934 and extended in 1950, and is classified as a Building of Architectural Interest.

Over the years, the decay has made room for irregular occupation by homeless people. The entrances to the house are currently bricked up, in an attempt to preserve what remains of the structure.

Decorated with naturalistic mosaics, Vila Algarve is above all a sombre symbol of colonial repression. Several fighters for Mozambique’s independence were held there, including the poet José Craveirinha, whose experience is reflected in poems such as "Não sei se é uma medalha" (1967) and in the two versions of "Vila Algarve", from 1988 and 1998.

After independence was proclaimed on 25 June 1975, the building was repeatedly overlooked by various projects that never got off the ground. In 2008, the Bar Association tried, without success, to establish its headquarters there. In 2011, the creation of the Museum of the Liberation Struggle in the same space was considered, a plan that also did not materialise.

Indeed, the former President of the Republic, Joaquim Chissano, who governed Mozambique between 1986 and 2005, revealed that, as Minister of Foreign Affairs, he proposed installing the ministry in Vila Algarve. "I tried to use Vila Algarve. I was not well understood", he said, in an interview with Lusa last June. “I always wanted the veterans of the National Liberation Struggle to be there as well, as their headquarters. We did not manage it, owing to various interpretations.”

Chissano called for the preservation of the property: "I hope someone can really restore and preserve this historic piece. It is a very important historic piece."

The historian Marlino Mubai, a professor at Eduardo Mondlane University, shares the same concern and finds the abandonment of Vila Algarve incomprehensible. "It is intimately linked to the history of Mozambique from the point of view of the struggle against colonial domination, fascist in particular", he said, recalling the failure of successive projects.

The future museum-hotel thus emerges as an unprecedented opportunity to reconcile historical memory, heritage enhancement and tourism development — giving the city of Maputo back one of its most symbolic buildings.