Paulo Dias de Novais founds Luanda, one of Africa’s oldest cities

Story: 1576 C.E.  |  Last updated: January 25, 1576

On January 25, 1576 C.E., a Portuguese explorer named Paulo Dias de Novais stepped ashore on Angola’s northern Atlantic coast and planted the founding of Luanda — a settlement that would grow, over five centuries, into one of Africa’s largest and most consequential cities. He arrived with one hundred settler families and four hundred soldiers, establishing a fortified outpost he named São Paulo da Assunção de Loanda.

What the evidence shows

• Founding of Luanda: Paulo Dias de Novais officially established the settlement on January 25, 1576 C.E., making Luanda one of the oldest continuously inhabited colonial cities in sub-Saharan Africa.
• Ambundu homeland: The site was situated in the territory of the Ambundu people, who had long inhabited the region and whose presence, trade networks, and political structures shaped the city’s early development as much as any Portuguese decree.
• São Paulo da Assunção de Loanda: The original name — used officially by Portuguese authorities — appears in 17th-century sources, while non-Portuguese writers frequently rendered the city as “St. Paul de Leonda” or “Leonda,” reflecting how widely the settlement was known across competing European powers.

A city born at a crossroads

The Atlantic coast of what is now Angola was not empty or unknown when Dias de Novais arrived. The Ambundu people — speakers of Kimbundu, one of Angola’s major Bantu languages — had established communities, agricultural systems, and trade routes across the region long before any European ship appeared on the horizon. Portuguese contact with the Kongo Kingdom to the north had begun nearly a century earlier, in the 1480s C.E., and the broader region was already enmeshed in long-distance exchange networks connecting the interior to the coast.

What Dias de Novais created in 1576 C.E. was, in the first instance, a fortified beachhead. The early settlement hugged the shoreline, and most colonists lived within or near the fort’s walls. Portuguese authority over the surrounding territory was contested and limited for decades. The kingdom of Ndongo, the dominant Ambundu state, resisted Portuguese expansion, and the colonial presence remained vulnerable well into the 17th century C.E.

Three fortresses would eventually define Luanda’s skyline: Fortaleza São Pedro da Barra (1618 C.E.), Fortaleza de São Miguel (1634 C.E.), and Forte de São Francisco do Penedo (1765 C.E.). The Fortaleza de São Miguel survives today as the best-preserved of the three — a physical anchor connecting the city’s present to its colonial origins.

The city Luanda became

By the 19th century C.E., Luanda had become one of the largest and most developed cities in the entire Portuguese Empire outside continental Portugal. When the slave trade was formally abolished in 1836 C.E. and Angola’s ports opened to foreign shipping in 1844 C.E., the city pivoted toward commercial trade in palm oil, peanut oil, ivory, timber, cotton, coffee, and cocoa. A local Angolan bourgeoisie emerged during this period — a class of merchants, professionals, and landowners with deep roots in the city.

In 1889 C.E., Governor Brito Capelo opened an aqueduct that finally gave the city a reliable water supply. That infrastructure investment laid the foundation for Luanda’s rapid growth in the 20th century C.E.

Today, Luanda is home to more than 8.8 million people — roughly one-third of Angola’s entire population. It is the most populous Portuguese-speaking national capital in the world and the most populous Lusophone city outside Brazil. The Ambundu people remain the city’s largest ethnic group, though Bakongo and Ovimbundu communities have grown significantly in recent decades. What began as a fortified colonial enclave has become a vast, multilingual, multiethnic African metropolis.

A connected history, not a solo act

The founding of Luanda is usually told as a Portuguese story — and in terms of formal colonial authority, it was. But the city that actually grew there was shaped by intersecting worlds.

Kimbundu-speaking Ambundu merchants, political leaders, and laborers were central to the early settlement’s survival and economy. The Imbangala — a mobile warrior confederation — became major trade partners and suppliers to the Luanda market by the 17th century C.E. Brazilian ships were the most numerous vessels in the port, making Luanda as much a node in a Brazilian-Atlantic economy as a Portuguese administrative outpost. The city’s very character — its architecture, its foodways, its creole culture — emerged from this collision and mingling of peoples.

When Angola achieved independence in 1975 C.E., Luanda was already a cosmopolitan city. It was also a city scarred by inequality. The civil war that followed independence lasted until 2002 C.E. and drove massive internal displacement, swelling Luanda’s population far beyond its infrastructure’s capacity. Musseques — informal settlements — stretched for kilometers beyond the city’s former limits.

Since the Luanda Agreement of 2002 C.E. ended the civil war, the city has undergone significant reconstruction. New highways, social housing projects, and commercial developments have reshaped its skyline. Luanda now ranks among the most economically dynamic cities in southern Africa, even as poverty and housing inequality remain serious challenges for millions of its residents.

Lasting impact

The founding of Luanda in 1576 C.E. set in motion a chain of consequences that reach into the present. The city became the administrative, commercial, and cultural capital of what would eventually become Angola — a nation of 36 million people, one of Africa’s largest oil producers, and a growing force in the African Union.

Luanda’s role as a port city made it a hub for the exchange of languages, religions, foods, and technologies across the Atlantic world. Scholars of Atlantic history have argued that the cultural exchanges passing through Luanda — including Kimbundu words, musical forms, and culinary traditions — left lasting imprints on Brazilian culture that endure today. The connection between Luanda and Brazil is one of the most consequential and least commonly taught chapters in Atlantic history.

The city’s Portuguese-language infrastructure also became, after independence, a unifying framework for a diverse nation of over 40 languages — a complicated inheritance that Angola has shaped into something distinctly its own.

Blindspots and limits

The founding of Luanda cannot be separated from the transatlantic slave trade. From roughly the mid-16th century C.E. through 1836 C.E., Luanda was the largest slave-trading port in the world, with estimates suggesting that between one and a half and two million enslaved people were shipped from its shores to Brazil and other parts of the Americas. The city’s early growth, its fortifications, and much of its commercial wealth were built directly on that trade. Local African rulers and merchants — including Ambundu and Imbangala leaders — were participants in the trade as well, profiting from captives taken in regional warfare. This history is not a footnote; it is the central economic fact of Luanda’s first three centuries.

The historical record of those centuries, moreover, reflects Portuguese and European perspectives far more than Ambundu, Kongo, or Imbangala ones. The voices of the people who shaped the city from the inside — and who bore the greatest cost of its development — remain far harder to recover.

Read more

For more on this story, see: Wikipedia — Luanda

For more from Good News for Humankind, see:

• Ghana establishes a marine protected area at Cape Three Points
• Indigenous land rights recognized for 160 million hectares at COP30
• The Good News for Humankind archive on Angola

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