Antananarivo, 'Tana' to everyone, is one of Africa's most unusual and photogenic capitals: a city of tall brick houses with wooden balconies climbing over twelve hills, crowned by the palace of the old kings, with steep stairways, overflowing markets and a highland feel that surprises anyone expecting the tropics. Its name means 'the city of the thousand warriors', after the garrison with which King Andrianjaka took the hill around 1610.
It is a city of sharp contrasts: chaotic, crowded and very poor in places, but also charming, warm and full of life, with a cuisine that blends Malagasy, French, Chinese and Indian influences and that many consider the best in the country. Nearly every traveller who comes to Madagascar passes through Tana, because the international airport is here and the roads and flights to the parks, beaches and baobabs start here.
This guide takes a practical look at Antananarivo: what to see in the Upper Town and Lower Town, how to visit the Rova royal palace and the sacred hill of Ambohimanga, where to see your first lemurs without leaving the area, how to get around a city with difficult traffic, and how to use Tana as a logistics base for planning the big trip around the island. Make good use of it and the capital stops being just a stopover and becomes a memorable introduction to Malagasy culture.
Antananarivo was born around 1610, when the Merina king Andrianjaka took the hill of Analamanga from the Vazimba, its first inhabitants, and stationed a garrison of a thousand soldiers there, which gave the city its name: 'the city of the thousand'. From that hill, the Merina kings gradually unified the island in the 19th century under Andrianampoinimerina and his son Radama I, until Tana became the capital of a kingdom that came to control almost all of Madagascar. The monarchy fell in 1897, when France deposed Queen Ranavalona III and sent her into exile. From the Merina kingdom to colonial and then independent Madagascar (1960), Tana's full story is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The political and spiritual heart of Madagascar: Tana rises over twelve sacred hills, capital of the old Merina kingdom, among terraced rice paddies, spa towns and the cradle of Malagasy craftsmanship.
Read the history of Antananarivo and the Highlands →If you book from here we earn a commission and you pay no more. Prices and availability come from Civitatis.
No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before Antananarivo existed, the Highlands of central Madagascar were home to the Vazimba, considered the island's first inhabitants, and the most prominent hill on the plateau was called Analamanga, 'the blue forest'. The Malagasy of the Highlands, the Merina people, descend from Austronesian migrants who arrived by sea from Southeast Asia more than a thousand years ago and later mixed with African and Arab influences. Their language, Malagasy, is a close relative of languages spoken in Borneo, an astonishing trace of that ocean crossing.
Around 1610, the Merina king Andrianjaka took the hill of Analamanga from the Vazimba and decided to set up his capital there, because of its strategic position overlooking the plain of rice paddies. According to tradition, he stationed a garrison of a thousand soldiers on it, and that gave the city its name: Antananarivo, 'the city of the thousand' (an-tanàna-arivo). At the very top of the hill he built the first royal enclosure, the Rova, which grew over the centuries into the dynasty's palace complex.
For almost two centuries, Antananarivo was the capital of one of the many Merina kingdoms competing for the Highlands of Imerina, a patchwork of rival principalities. City life was organised around the cult of the ancestors and of the sovereigns, with royal tombs, sacred taboos (the 'fady') and a complex society of castes and clans that still shapes Malagasy culture today.
The big leap came at the end of the 18th century with Andrianampoinimerina (who reigned roughly from 1787 to 1810), one of the key figures in Malagasy history. From his base at Ambohimanga, the sacred 'blue hill' on the outskirts of today's Tana, he reunified the feuding Merina kingdoms and took Antananarivo, which he made his main capital. He promoted terraced rice farming, organised the state and its markets, and left behind a famous phrase that sums up his ambition: that the sea should be the border of his kingdom ('the sea is the edge of my rice field').
His son Radama I (1810-1828) inherited the project and carried it forward. With British support (he signed treaties with the British, who wanted to curb the slave trade and counter France), he modernised and armed his army and extended Merina rule over much of the island, subduing other peoples such as the Betsileo, the Sakalava of the coast and others. Radama opened the country to Protestant missionaries from the London Missionary Society, who introduced written Malagasy in the Latin alphabet, the printing press, schools and Christianity, deeply transforming Highland society.
So in just a few decades, Antananarivo went from being the capital of a local kingdom to the head of a state that ruled almost all of Madagascar, with its own court, administration and army, a unique case in the Africa of the time.
When Radama I died, his widow Ranavalona I (1828-1861) took the throne, an iron-willed queen who ruled for more than three decades. Wary of growing foreign influence, she expelled most of the missionaries, persecuted Malagasy Christians (many were martyred) and largely closed the country to the outside world, defending its sovereignty and traditions against the European powers. Her court, however, employed the Frenchman Jean Laborde, an adventurer and engineer who set up industries and built for her the wooden palace of Manjakamiadana, the central building of the Rova.
After Ranavalona I, the kingdom went through a period of opening up and modernisation under her successors, but real power passed more and more into the hands of one man: Rainilaiarivony, prime minister from 1864 to 1895. From his pink palace at Andafiavaratra, in the Upper Town, he effectively ran the country for three decades, marrying three queens in succession (Rasoherina, Ranavalona II and Ranavalona III). In 1869, Queen Ranavalona II and the prime minister converted to Protestant Christianity and declared it the religion of the court, which sped up the Christianisation of the Highlands and the building of large churches in Tana.
It was a golden age for the capital: palaces, churches, schools and grand brick residences went up, and the city took on the look of tall houses with wooden balconies that still defines its Upper Town. But beyond its walls, France was pushing harder and harder to take the island.
The fate of the Merina kingdom was sealed by French colonial expansion. After a first Franco-Malagasy war in the 1880s and a treaty that imposed a protectorate the court never willingly accepted, France launched a military expedition in 1895 that marched from the west coast up to Antananarivo. The capital fell that same year, and in 1896 Madagascar was declared a French colony. In 1897, General Gallieni abolished the monarchy and exiled the last sovereign, Queen Ranavalona III, first to Réunion and then to Algeria, where she died in exile in 1917. That ended almost three centuries of royalty on the hill of the thousand.
Under French rule, Antananarivo remained the administrative capital. The colonisers laid out avenues, built public buildings and the Soarano railway station, ran the railway line to the east coast and to the south, and reorganised the economy around export crops. Colonial society was deeply unequal, and resentment kept growing. In 1947 a major nationalist uprising broke out in the east of the island and was brutally crushed by France, leaving tens of thousands dead, one of the most tragic and least known episodes of African decolonisation.
That uprising and the post-war wave of decolonisation paved the way to independence. Madagascar regained its sovereignty on 26 June 1960, with Antananarivo as the capital of the new Malagasy Republic.
Since independence, Antananarivo has been the main stage of Madagascar's turbulent political life. The pro-Western First Republic fell in 1972 after huge popular protests. Then came the long socialist, pro-Soviet period under Didier Ratsiraka, who nationalised the economy and renamed the country the Democratic Republic of Madagascar. Tana's squares and avenues, especially Avenue de l'Indépendance and the esplanade in front of City Hall, have seen demonstrations, uprisings and recurring crises: 1991, 2002 and 2009 brought turbulent political transitions that were often decided on the streets of the capital.
The city itself grew explosively and with little planning. From a few hundred thousand inhabitants in the mid-20th century it went to more than a million in the municipality and several million in the metropolitan area, spilling over the hills and filling the surrounding rice-paddy plains with working-class neighbourhoods. Poverty, chaotic traffic and overstretched services sit alongside an intense cultural, university and commercial life. A painful symbol of those years was the 1995 fire that destroyed the Rova, the royal palace, a wound the city took decades to restore.
Today Antananarivo is still the heart of Madagascar: seat of government, economic engine and the gateway for almost every traveller arriving on the island. A city of a thousand hills and a thousand contrasts, it keeps the memory of the Merina kings in its Upper Town and the pulse of a young country, poor and at the same time incredibly rich in culture and nature, in its markets. Understanding Tana (its history of kingdoms, missionaries, colonisation and independence) is the best way to start understanding Madagascar.
