Madagascar

In 2013 I visited this beautiful Island from North to South and East to West. It is absolutely amazing to see how many different species of flora and founa lives on the “Red Island”.
In the Malagasy language, the island of Madagascar is called Madagasikara and its people are referred to as Malagasy. The island’s appellation “Madagascar” is not of local origin but rather was popularized in the Middle Ages by Europeans. The name Madageiscar was first recorded in the memoirs of 13th-century Venetian explorer Marco Polo as a corrupted transliteration of the name Mogadishu, the Somali port with which Polo had confused the island. On St. Laurence’s Day in 1500, Portuguese explorer Diogo Dias landed on the island and christened it São Lourenço, but Polo’s name was preferred and popularized on Renaissance maps. In 2012, the population of Madagascar was estimated at 22 million. The Malagasy ethnic group forms over 90 percent of Madagascar’s population and is typically divided into eighteen ethnic sub-groups.