We stayed in Cotonou for a couple of days. Cotonou is the largest city in Benin with about 750,000 residents but there are over two million people in the greater urban area. It's situated on a strip of land between the Gulf of Guinea and Lake Nokoue. Cotonou is the seat of government in Benin, but not the official capital, which is Porto-Novo.

I thought Benin and Cotonou seemed more prosperous than Ghana or Togo. I would definitely say that we saw more infrastructure projects such as road improvements and large building works here.

Our first stop on this day in Cotonou was the Warrior Woman Statue. It stands in a huge public square and is almost 100 feet tall. It was evidently built to honor the world's only all-female army. That army was part of the Kingdom of Dahomey, a West African empire from 1625 to 1894. The statue was erected in 2022.

Next we visited the "seven deity temple", or something like that. It was a Voodoo temple that looked like a termite mound, on purpose. You can see some of the deity heads on the fence surrounding the temple. Voodoo was also very active in Benin.

We have now driven from Cotonou to Porto-Novo, the Capital. Here, we visited the Great Mosque of Porto-Novo. It was built between 1912 and 1925 during the French period in what is now Benin. Our local guide told us that this mosque was built by former slaves who had been sold and shipped from here to Brazil. When a group of these former slaves returned from Brazil to Benin, they wanted to do something special to celebrate. They decided to build a mosque, since they were Muslims, and this area was a Muslim area. It might seem peculiar but these former slaves from Brazil had only seen Catholic churches in Brazil. For that reason, the great mosque resembles a catholic church with a certain African-Brazilian architecture. Unfortunately for the returning slaves, the local Muslims refused to use it as it didn't look like a mosque to them. So, this mosque has gone unused, as a mosque, for its entire existence. It's too bad as I think it's a beautiful building. The local Muslims later built a mosque right next door which you can see in the second photo below.

In the second photo, of the new mosque, you can see the great mosque on the right side of the photo. The local Muslims use the new mosque.

On our walk from where we parked the bus to the Great Mosque, we passed a small street side restaurant. They had a handful of customers as it was getting near lunch time.

I think the first open pot is a fish dish, perhaps in a tomato sauce with vegetables. The second photo is a beans and rice dish. I can attest that it smelled very good.