Braga Street

Braga began as a cart track and became, in the 1920s and 1930s, the fashionable shopping street of Bandung when the Dutch administration was preparing to move the colonial capital here from Batavia - European boutiques, cafés and department stores in a run of Art Deco and Nieuwe Bouwen fronts, which is where the Paris van Java label came from. Bandung has one of the larger surviving concentrations of tropical Art Deco anywhere, and the street is the compact demonstration of it, with the Majestic cinema, the Braga Permai and a set of restored and unrestored façades side by side. At the corner is Gedung Merdeka, where the Asian-African Conference met in 1955 - the meeting of newly independent African and Asian states that fed into the Non-Aligned Movement - now a museum.

What you actually see

• Tropical Art Deco fronts - the 1920s and 1930s shopping street largely intact.
• The Majestic cinema - among the surviving named buildings on the street.
• Gedung Merdeka - the 1955 Asian-African Conference hall, now a museum.
• Restoration in patches - fine façades next to neglected ones.

When to go

All year; evenings for the street life. Half a day.

Honest expectations

Restoration is uneven and some buildings are in poor repair. Weekend traffic and crowds are heavy. Prices in the Braga cafés are well above Bandung norms.

Nearby

Gedung Merdeka and the Asia Afrika museum are at the corner; Alun-Alun is south.