Andapa

Andapa is one of the districts that make up the SAVA region (Sambava, Antalaha, Vohémar, Andapa), in the north of Madagascar. It is a city with a discreet charm and incredible riches born from discovery and contemplation.

Surrounded by hills and mountains, Andapa is a green enclave in this red land of Madagascar. Its wooden and brick houses form a tangle of dwellings in the heart of rice fields and lend an atypical charm to the city. Andapa is calm and pleasant to live in. It is a serene but lively city. Known as one of Madagascar’s rice granaries, Andapa alone has 13,000 ha of rice fields, its population’s main resource. A very cosmopolitan community of Malagasy and foreigners live together in harmony here. According to history, the population of Andapa used to be of Tsimihety origin. People, attracted by the microclimate and extraordinary fertility of this richly silty basin, moved to settle there. Another large part of the land is dedicated to farming and another part to herding.

The Town of Andapa

“The town itself is one of my favourite in Madagascar. The relative wealth of the area shows in the goods available in the many shops, but because it sees relatively few tourists – and only the very best sort: those willing to hike up steep slopes in pouring rain – the people are exceptionally friendly and easygoing. It is also wonderfully compact, which comes as a relief after straggly Sambava, and cool. Even if you are not doing the major trek in Marojejy … there are numerous wonderful walks in the area.”
Andapa lies in a broad, flat valley – basically a basin – surrounded on all sides by high mountains.

Transformed over the ages from a huge lake into swamplands filled with rich sediments from the runoff of the surrounding mountain rainforests, the Andapa Basin was a fertile land when the first humans arrived in the nineteenth century. These first settlers were people fleeing from the persecution of the Merina people of Madagascar’s central highlands. Over the past two hundred years, people from all the different ethnicities of Madagascar have immigrated into the Andapa area – and all have benefited from the incredible richness of Andapa’s soils. Andapa has become the “rice bowl” or “rice granary” of northeastern Madagascar, the Basin transformed into vast, lush fields of rice. As the population has increased, the original tiny hamlets have grown and formed a web of villages interspersed all through these rice fields.