Miradouro da Lua
Interesting facts
- The cliffs expose the deposits of an ancient delta of the Cuanza River, built up between the late Miocene and the Pleistocene and later lifted above the sea.
- Geologists divide the cliff face into five depositional units, each separated from the next by a surface of erosion.
- Pliocene layers in the cliffs preserve the mouth bars of a bird's-foot delta whose channels repeatedly and abruptly switched course.
- Ancient submarine gullies, cut into the delta slope and filled by river-driven turbidity currents and tidal deposits, can be traced in the cliff walls.
- The top six metres or so are a deep tropical weathering profile, recording long exposure of the plateau surface during warm Pleistocene interglacials.
- Sharp shifts between the layers point to large swings in sea level, amplified by major uplift of the Angolan coast.
- Jorge António's 1993 film named after the cliffs won a special directing prize at the Gramado Film Festival in Brazil.
- The film ends at the cliffs themselves, where its young hero from Lisbon decides to remain in Angola.
Why it is worth it
Miradouro da Lua, the "Viewpoint of the Moon", is a stretch of eroded cliffs on Angola's Atlantic coast where wind and rain have carved soft earth into a maze of ridges, gullies, spires and pinnacles that looks more lunar than terrestrial. Seen from the edge, the slopes fall away in fluted badlands toward the ocean, banded in red, ochre and pale grey, and the eroded escarpment runs for several hundred metres along the shore.
The cliffs are made of soft sedimentary layers, mostly sands, clays and silts laid down over a very long time. Because the material is weak, rain runoff cuts channels into it, and the more resistant layers survive as thin crests and needles while the rest washes away. The warm reds and ochres come from iron oxides in the sediments, while the paler bands are richer in lime.
The site lies in the municipality of Belas, about 40 km south of Luanda, on the coastal road that leads toward the Kwanza river mouth at Barra do Cuanza and the beaches of Cabo Ledo, and it has become one of the most visited sights in Angola. It also gave its name to the 1993 film "O Miradouro da Lua" by the Portuguese director Jorge António, the first Portuguese-Angolan cinema co-production, which tells of a young man from Lisbon who travels to Angola in search of the father he never knew.
Getting there
Miradouro da Lua lies beside the EN100 national road, the coastal highway south of Luanda, about 40 km from the city centre; the nearest settlement is Ramiros, about 18 km away. Quatro de Fevereiro International Airport (LAD) in Luanda is about 43 km away.
On these lists
-9.22111, 13.08972per Wikidata