Paramaribo walking tour: the wooden inner city, from Fort Zeelandia to sunset on the Waterkant

The white wooden houses with green shutters are neither a Dutch import nor a tropical style. They are both at once: Dutch building forms, built in Surinamese timber by African and later Asian hands, adapted to heat and rain. You can read it in the tall doors, the louvred shutters and the raised floors.

We start on Independence Square, walk to Fort Zeelandia, the oldest structure in the city, and the place where fifteen men were killed in December 1982, something Suriname has still not closed the book on, and cross the Palm Garden, laid out in the seventeenth century and still full of royal palms and occasionally howler monkeys.

Then the Keizerstraat, where the Neveh Shalom synagogue and the mosque stand literally next door to each other and have shared a car park for over a century. It gets photographed as a curiosity; we would rather tell you how it came about, because that says more about Suriname than the picture does.

We finish along the Waterkant, past the Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral, at 44 metres one of the largest wooden church buildings in the western hemisphere, and end at the river, usually just before sunset.