Port au Prince - Culture

Gingerbread trim and a view of the harbor are about all Port-au-Prince has in common with other Caribbean capitals. It's a backward city, but it's no backwater. Much of the activity is centered on the Marche de Fer (the Ironmarket), a 19th century iron and tin mix of Paris train shed and Indian minarets. It's chaos inside, packed with stalls, vendors and piles of fruit, baskets, soap, religious totems and toys. It's hot, noisy and likely to overwhelm the faint of heart.

Good places to seek post-shopping repose are the Cathedrale de Port-au-Prince, where the decor owes as much to Africa as to Rome, and the Cathedrale de la Ste Trinite, where you can gaze up at murals by some of the country's most famous artists. The Musee d'Art Haitien du College St Pierre has an excellent collection of paintings. The Musee National is more of a national curio cabinet, featuring King Christophe's suicide pistol and a rusty anchor reputed to have been salvaged from Columbus' Santa Maria.

In the hills to the southeast of the city is Petionville, as close as the country gets to typical Caribbean resort culture. Galleries sell Haitian art, and restaurants serve some of the best French cuisine in the country. The Jane Barbancourt Distillery in Boutiller, a few miles east of Port-au-Prince, makes nearly two dozen varieties of rum, including flavors like coffee, coconut and hibiscus. You can taste samples and buy bottles at bargain prices.

The National Palace (rebuilt in 1918), the army barracks, and an imposing statue of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, hero of the wars of independence, dominate the Place du Champ-de-Mars in the centre of the city. The most picturesque site is the brash and bustling Iron Market, where the vendors are mostly women. Other notable landmarks include the Cathedral of Notre Dame, with the adjacent colonial cathedral, and the National Archives, National Library, and National Museum. Port-au-Prince is the centre of the political and intellectual life of the nation and is the seat of the State University of Haiti (established in 1920). Recreation for the privileged centres around European-style social clubs, but the house of the local voodoo priest is still the heart of the urban poor community.

Most of the Haitian elite (nearly all mulatto or nonblacks) live in the suburb of Petionville in the hills southeast of Port-au-Prince. Haiti's small but politically important black middle class is also concentrated around Port-au-Prince. Squalor and neglect surround most of the black urban working class even more than the subsistence farmer, and constant migration from the countryside continues to exacerbate their misery.

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