Ian Thomson

Paris of the gutter

Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, lies on a marshy bay encircled by mountains.

issue 30 January 2010

Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, lies on a marshy bay encircled by mountains. It was founded in 1749 by the colonial French and named after a vessel, Le Prince, which anchored there about 1680 (and not, as the dictator ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier apparently liked to believe, after The Prince by Machiavelli).

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