Ambatolampy

Ambatolampy supplies much of Madagascar with cooking pots, and it does it in small yard foundries where scrap aluminium, mostly old engine parts and drinks cans, is melted over charcoal and poured into moulds packed from local sand. Each pot is cast individually: the mould is made around a wooden pattern, the metal poured, the sand broken away, and the raw casting filed and polished by hand. Workshops sit along the road and in the back streets and most will let you watch, which takes twenty minutes and is genuinely absorbing, since nothing about the process is mechanised. The work is hot, smoky and done without protective gear, which is worth knowing before you photograph it. The town is otherwise an ordinary highland market centre on the road south.

What you actually see

• Charcoal furnaces - scrap aluminium melted in small yard foundries.
• Sand moulds - patterns packed and broken open for each pot.
• Hand finishing - castings filed and polished by hand.
• The pot market - finished cookware stacked for sale along the road.

When to go

Year round; workshops run on ordinary working days, so weekday mornings are the time to find them active. The highlands are cool and often wet, but this is an indoor and yard activity.

Honest expectations

Conditions in the foundries are hard and unprotected, and visitors should be conscious of that rather than treating it as a spectacle. A tip is expected and photography should be asked about first. The town has no other attractions and is a stop of an hour or two on the RN7.

Nearby

Antsirabe lies south; Antananarivo is north on the same road.