Azura Bazaruto

About Azura Bazaruto

Dinner moves nightly at Azura: the Jelly Fish restaurant one evening, a lantern-lit table on the sand the next, the wine cellar for the weekly seven-course tasting. The kitchen on Benguerra Island cooks to what the dhow fleet and the island farms hand it that morning, and the fully inclusive rate (from $905 per person per night in 2025) folds every one of those meals in. The World Travel Awards named Azura Mozambique's Leading Beach Resort 2025; the food is a large part of the case.

Within our Bazaruto Archipelago dining guide this is the small-island option: Anantara Bazaruto Island Restaurant feeds a far larger resort across the channel, while Azura keeps its villa count low and its tables scattered along one quiet shoreline. By the standard of the seven signs of a great restaurant, the surprise is how many a kitchen on a roadless island manages to hit.

The Kitchen

Peter Goffe-Wood consults as the lodge's food alchemist, a title that undersells 35 years of classical training. He flies in quarterly to reset the repertoire with head chef Jorge Zivane, a Benguerra Islander who runs the line day to day with a local team, and the split shows: Goffe-Wood's structure, Zivane's instinct for what the channel gives up. The crab curry is the dish guests remember, line-caught fish lands daily, and the vegetables come from organic farms on the island itself.

Once a week the kitchen stretches into a seven-course tasting menu, and once a week it goes the other way with a Mozambican evening of grilled catch and peri-peri. Set against the best seafood restaurants worldwide, this is the rare kitchen where the boat, the farm and the table share a single shoreline, and the menu is written after the boats come back, not before.

The Room

There is no single room. The Jelly Fish restaurant is open-sided timber and thatch above the beach; the Peri Peri Beach Club handles barefoot lunches; the wine cellar seats a private dinner in the cool below the sand. Sound is surf and little else, light after dark is lantern and candle, and the dress code never gets past barefoot-smart. Tables are set far enough apart that the next conversation belongs to the tide, and private dinners on your own villa deck are part of the plan rather than a supplement.