Ouidah

Ouidah, on the coast of present-day Benin, was from the 17th to the 19th century one of the busiest ports of the transatlantic slave trade, through which an estimated one million enslaved people passed on their way to the Americas — the majority of them practitioners of Vodun, a religion native to the Fon, Ewe, and Yoruba peoples of the region (and the direct ancestor of Haitian Vodou, Brazilian Candomblé, and related traditions across the African diaspora). Today, the 4-kilometre "Route des Esclaves" retraces the path enslaved people walked from the town's auction site to the beach, marked by memorials including the "Tree of Forgetfulness," around which captives were reportedly forced to walk to erase their memory of home, and ending at the "Door of No Return," a monumental arch facing the Atlantic erected in 1995.

Ouidah remains, alongside this history, one of the principal spiritual centres of Vodun, which was recognised as an official religion in Benin in 1996 and is celebrated each January with a national Vodun Festival. At the centre of town stands the Temple of Pythons, home to dozens of royal pythons considered sacred to the python deity Dangbe; according to local tradition, any python that wanders into a nearby home is gently returned to the temple by its residents, and the temple sits, by design, directly across a small square from Ouidah's Basilica of the Immaculate Conception — a juxtaposition often presented to visitors as emblematic of the town's long history of religious coexistence between Vodun and Christianity.