Beira, Mozambique being a favourite holiday destination for white Rhodesians. One reminder of this is the Grande Hotel, built by the Portuguese, near the shore of the Indian Ocean. By 1970, the city of Beira had 113,770 inhabitants. After independence from Portugal in 1975, many white ethnic Portuguese left the city. Mozambique was ravaged by a civil war from 1977 to 1992, opposing Marxist FRELIMO, which controlled the government, to the rebels of RENAMO, descending to near total chaos in a couple of years. The famine, disease and poverty-stricken country collapsed. In Beira, the famous Grande Hotel was occupied by around 1,000
Postage stamps and postal history of Mozambique 1975, many existing stamps, some going back as far as 1953, were issued with an overprint marking independence. Issues of independent Mozambique have been relatively restrained and focus on local subjects. Philatelic issues are frequently released in sets of four-to-six stamps. For instance, in 1985 there were 10 issues, of which three were single commemoratives, five were sets of four, and the remaining two were sets of six. The Kionga Triangle was a tiny territory on the border between German East Africa (present-day Tanzania) and Portuguese Mozambique occupied by the Portuguese forces in 1916. On May 29, 1916, stamps from