The History of the Residence of Finland in Maputo

The Residence of the Ambassador of Finland in Mozambique, located on the Rua da Gorongosa street in Maputo, has a history worth sharing. The house was designed in the late 1960s by the most famous architect in Mozambique’s architectural history, Pancho Guedes, and has throughout the decades had an interesting residential history. It has been the Finnish Ambassador’s residence since 2003, and since 2007, the Government of Finland also owns it.

Architecture

Amâncio d'Alpoim Miranda "Pancho" Guedes (1925-2015) was a Portuguese architect, sculptor and painter who lived much of his life in Mozambique, until the country’s independence in 1975, when he, like thousands of other Portuguese, had to leave the country. A pathbreaking and productive architect, Guedes created hundreds of buildings in the 1950s and 1960s, many of them in Maputo, which was then still known by its Portuguese colonial name Lourenço Marques. The style of Guedes and his contemporaries has been described as “tropicalized modernism”.  

One of Guedes’ finest pieces is the Casa Simões Ferreira, the current Finnish Residence. This house was one of his three “Euclidian Palaces”, the two others being the current residences of the Italian Ambassador and the South African High Commissioner in Maputo. Described “precise and geometric” by Guedes himself, these villas are, indeed, true to the origin of their name: Euclid, the ancient Greek mathematician, is considered the father of geometry.

Guedes himself called the Casa Simões Ferreira, built in 1968-1969, “the best of all the Euclidian Palaces” –his words in the exhibition guide of his retrospective (Pancho Guedes, Vitruvius Mozambicanus) held in Lisbon in 2009. Rich in carefully thought-out details, much of the interiors of the house were built with worked pod mahogany wood.  

Some unique photographs on the building phase of the house can be found at Houses of Maputo blog(Linkki toiselle web-sivustolle.). As the photos show, the Casa Simões Ferreira was the first one to be built on the Rua da Gorongosa hillside – which today is fully built. Here, it needs to be noted that the Casa Simões Ferreira is also known by the name “House of the Broken Pediment”.

Casa Simões Ferreira

The person who commissioned the house, Dr. José Simões Ferreira, was a wealthy, Portuguese-born oncologist, who turned to Pancho Guedes with the request to design a house for his daughter Teresa. Teresa, however, moved abroad for her studies, got married and moved to the US, and hence, apparently never actually lived in the house. The person Teresa Simões Ferreira got married to was John Heinz, the heir of the Heinz ketchup empire, and later, a Senator. After Mr. Heinz’s demise, Mrs. Teresa Heinz remarried to Senator John Kerry, who has served also as the US Secretary of State.

The Simões Ferreira family was among those Portuguese who had to leave Mozambique and their property behind when the country gained its independence in 1975. The Casa Simões Ferreira was, subsequently, among the countless private properties that were nationalized 1976, with the creation of the APIE (the Portuguese abbreviation for the State Real Estate Park Administration).   

Expansion of the house

After Mozambique’s independence, the house was briefly used by a person who worked for a UN organization in Maputo. After that, in 1978, the house moved into the hands of a Mozambican family, until the mid-1990s.

During these years, the house grew in size. The original Casa Simões Ferreira got an additional floor, a basement floor, to complement the original two floors of the house. New elements were added also in the garden.

As mentioned above, for a long time, the house was the only one on the Rua da Gorongosa street. The hillside going down to the ocean was in its natural state, with animals and plants giving company to residents passing through. It was only from the mid-1990s onwards that the further construction of the area started picking up. A few years after this, the house was sold to another private owner.

Residence

Finland established diplomatic relations with Mozambique on 18 July 1975, just weeks after the country had become independent on 25 June of the same year. Initially, Finland covered the embassy-level relations to Mozambique through a side-accreditation from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. In 1989, Finland established a development cooperation office in Maputo, which also operated under the Embassy of Finland in Tanzania. In 1999, the side-accreditation for Mozambique moved from Dar es Salaam to the Finnish Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa. And subsequently, in 2003, Finland opened a full-fledged Embassy in Maputo, and accredited a plenipotentiary ambassador to Mozambique.

It was at this point that Finland started renting the property at Rua da Gorongosa 96, the Casa Simões Ferreira, as its ambassadorial residence. And, when the opportunity arose in 2007 to purchase the property, the Government of Finland decided to take this step. Since then, the house has been owned and maintained by Finland. The Finnish Government has made only a few notable changes to the house, one of them being the sauna that was built in the basement of the house – in line with the fact that practically all Finnish houses have a sauna of their own.

Since 2003, the Residence has had the following ambassadorial residents: Mr. Markku Kauppinen, Mr. Kari Alanko, Mr. Matti Kääriäinen, Ms. Seija Toro, Ms. Laura Torvinen and Ms. Anna-Kaisa Heikkinen.

Sources

This text would not have come about without valuable sources of information. I have been very fortunate to get to know the Mozambican family who lived in the house after 1978. Professor Esther Giani at the University of Venice, who has done extensive research on Pancho Guedes, guided me to several good sources of information. The former German Ambassador Philipp Schauer published in 2015 a book called “Maputo – Architectural and Tourist Guide” which devotes a page to the Casa Simões Ferreira. And, there is, obviously, also a Wikipedia page on Pancho Guedes(Linkki toiselle web-sivustolle.), which includes many good links to further reading.

Anna-Kaisa Heikkinen

Ambassador of Finland

January 2024