Mtwara travel guide

do you like Mtwara?

Mtwara is a sizeable town that came to prominence during the British period. It has been a centre for agricultural processing, and there is a factory for shelling and canning the cashew nuts that are grown extensively in the southeast . Although the town itself is set a little way from the shore, Mtwara boasts a magnificent sheltered harbour. However the port, built in 1948-1954, has never been used to capacity as there is relatively little traffic generated in this economically depressed region. The second deepest port in Africa, it was built as part of the ill-fated scheme to grow and export groundnuts from southern Tanzania, a project that included the construction of a railway from Mtwara to Nachingwea – now dismantled. The scheme was implemented after the Second World War, when the British had taken control of what was then Tanganyika from the Germans, and the groundnuts were expected to make up for post-war food shortages in the United Kingdom and for export to the rest of Europe. There are current plans to dredge and widen the port’s entrance channel to facilitate the handling of larger modern vessels.