Severe storms during December 2006 damaged the bulkhead, allowing water to flow in and wash backfill out from under the terminal's paving blocks.

The resulting collapse of pavement blocks has made operations at the terminal less efficient and reduced the storage space available.

The African baobab tree near the coast is the largest specimen in Madagascar, having a circumference of 21 metres (69 ft), and is the symbol of the city.

At least a dozen ports were identified in northern Madagascar by the late fifteenth century by the Arab geographer Ibn Mājid...By the early eighteenth century, Andriamandisoarivo, with the support of his eight-hundred-man army, founded a new Sakalava dynasty in the north which he named Volamena, meaning red money or gold.

Inhabited by “native” Muslims and others from “Surate, Johana, Mosembeck, and the Commoro islands,” Mahajanga was clearly a prosperous and cosmopolitan port.

A Sakalava queen married an East African (or Comorian) man around the middle of the eighteenth century, according to English and Dutch reports.

"[3] In the 1780s, a community of roughly 200 Muslim traders from the Indian Subcontinent had formed at Mahajanga at the mouth of the Betsiboka River, according to French traveler Dumaine.

In December 2006, a cyclone hit Mahajanga, causing significant damage to the port facilities and to some buildings on or near the coast.

Ali Soilih (1937 – 1978) a Comorian socialist revolutionary and political figure who served as the Dictator of the State of the Comoros from 3 January 1976 to 13 May 1978.