Equatorial Guinea

Equatorial Guinea is the only sovereign state in Africa where Spanish is the official language, one of the smallest countries on the continent, and — by almost any measure of visitor numbers — the least travelled country in Africa that is not actively at war. It receives a few thousand tourists a year, most of whom are oil-industry spouses on a weekend out.

It is split in two. Bioko is a volcanic island 40 km off the coast of Cameroon, with a 3,011 m peak, a caldera full of primates and the wettest coastline in Africa. Río Muni is the mainland, wedged between Cameroon and Gabon, and is rainforest. Plus Annobón, a speck of volcanic rock 600 km out in the Atlantic, and a few smaller islands. The capital is on the island; the largest city is on the mainland.

Why anyone comes: wildlife, essentially. The Gran Caldera de Luba on Bioko holds seven primate species including the drill and the Bioko red colobus, at densities that exist because almost nobody goes there. Ureca's beaches take four species of nesting sea turtle. Monte Alén on the mainland has forest elephants, gorillas and chimpanzees. For a certain kind of traveller this is one of the most rewarding countries in the region.

Why almost nobody does: it is difficult and expensive. Hotels are priced for oil executives, the visa process has historically been demanding, independent movement is limited, roadblocks are frequent, and the photography rules are strict enough that people have been detained for pointing a camera at the wrong building. This page treats all of that as the main practical content rather than as a footnote, because that is what it is.

The name is purely descriptive and slightly inaccurate: the country lies just north of the equator on the mainland, though Annobón is south of it. "Guinea" is the old European name for the West African coast, and "Equatorial" distinguishes it from Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and Papua New Guinea — a set of countries whose only common feature is that name.

A mainland rectangle and a scatter of islands, 28,051 km² in total — a little larger than Belgium, a third of Czechia. Everything is equatorial: hot, wet, and forested to a degree that made the interior almost impassable until oil money built roads.

Nothing here connects to anything else the way a normal country's map suggests. The capital is on an island 250 km from the mainland it governs, and reaching the third-largest population centre means an ocean flight.

The Bubi settled Bioko from the mainland, probably from the first millennium BCE. Portugal claimed the island in 1472 — Fernão do Pó gave it his name — and made almost nothing of it. In 1778, by the Treaty of El Pardo, Portugal traded Bioko, Annobón and rights on the mainland coast to Spain in exchange for territory in South America. Spain's first expedition lost most of its men to disease within months and withdrew.

For much of the 19th century Britain effectively ran the island, leasing it as a base for the West Africa Squadron suppressing the slave trade, and settling freed Africans and Sierra Leonean Krio at Clarence — later Santa Isabel, now Malabo. Their descendants, the Fernandinos, became a distinct English-speaking Protestant elite.

Spain took the colony properly in hand only from the late 19th century, and made it a cocoa economy — Bioko's volcanic soil produced some of the world's finest cacao, worked largely by contract labour brought from Nigeria. By the 1960s Spanish Guinea had one of the highest per-capita incomes and literacy rates in Africa.

Independence came on 12 October 1968, granted rapidly under UN pressure and with almost no preparation. Francisco Macías Nguema won the presidential election. Within a year the country had begun the collapse described in the next section.

What happened in Equatorial Guinea between 1968 and 1979 is among the most extreme episodes of the twentieth century, and it is very little known outside the country. Francisco Macías Nguema declared himself President for Life in 1972 and ran the state as a personal instrument until his nephew overthrew and executed him in 1979.

Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo took power in August 1979 and has held it ever since — the world's longest-serving living head of state who is not a monarch. He has been re-elected repeatedly with official results in the range of 93 to 99 per cent, in contests that no international observer has described as competitive.

In 1995 the Zafiro field came online off Bioko and Equatorial Guinea became, briefly, one of the fastest-growing economies on Earth. Within a decade it had a GDP per capita on paper higher than several EU member states, and one of the widest gaps between that figure and the way most of its population actually lived that has ever been recorded.

A city of around 300,000 on the northern edge of Bioko, in the crater of an extinct volcano opening onto the sea. Founded by the British as Clarence in 1827 and Spanish Santa Isabel until 1973, it is the most attractive colonial-era townscape in Central Africa — and it is small enough to walk in a morning.

Bata is the largest city in the country — bigger than the capital — on the mainland coast, and it feels like a different nation: hotter, flatter, more African, more crowded, and less Spanish. It is where most Equatoguineans live and work.

In the middle of the mainland rainforest, at Djibloho, the government has been building a new capital. Announced as Oyala and renamed Ciudad de la Paz, it is intended to house government, a university, a five-star hotel district and eventually 200,000 people, in forest that was empty a decade ago.

A guide that describes the beaches and omits this would be dishonest. Equatorial Guinea is consistently ranked among the most repressive states in the world, and any visitor should arrive understanding the environment they are moving through — not because they are at risk, but because the people around them are.

Bioko is a 2,017 km² volcano rising straight out of the Gulf of Guinea, geologically part of the Cameroon Line and biologically a continental fragment isolated by rising seas at the end of the last ice age. That isolation is why it has the endemics it does, and why conservation biologists care about it far more than travel writers do.

Bioko's southern tip is one of the most important sea turtle nesting sites in the Gulf of Guinea, and one of the wettest places in Africa — Ureca records rainfall in the order of ten metres a year, which is roughly fifteen times what falls on Prague.

The mainland's principal protected area: around 2,000 km² of rainforest between Bata and the interior, part of a transboundary complex continuing into Gabon. It has the megafauna the islands do not.

Two of the least-visited inhabited places in Africa, both belonging to a country that is itself barely visited.

For a small country, Equatorial Guinea holds a disproportionate share of Gulf of Guinea biodiversity — a consequence of having both an isolated oceanic-style island and a slice of intact Congo Basin forest.

Something around 1.7 million people, though census figures are contested and estimates vary widely. The population is young, urbanising fast, and includes a substantial number of West and Central African migrant workers drawn by the oil economy.

Spanish is the language of government, education and the media, and around two-thirds of the population speaks it — the only place in Africa where that is true. French and Portuguese are also official, for regional-bloc and Lusophone-diplomacy reasons respectively, and neither is much spoken.

Central African cooking with a Spanish layer on top: cassava, plantain, yam and malanga as the base, fish and chicken as the protein, palm oil and peanut as the sauces, and a colonial inheritance of Spanish bread, tinned goods and the occasional improbable paella.

Equatorial, hot and wet. Temperatures sit between 25 and 32 °C essentially every day of the year and humidity is high enough that the number matters less than it should. What varies is the rain — and Bioko and the mainland do not have the same pattern, which catches people out.

Two international airports: Malabo (SSG) on Bioko and Bata (BSG) on the mainland. Both are small, both are modern, and photographing either of them is a good way to have a difficult afternoon.

The natural route from Europe is through Madrid, which is a straight consequence of the colonial history — Iberia has flown Madrid to Malabo for decades and it remains the most dependable connection.

Historically one of the hardest tourist visas in Africa to obtain. The rules have been changing, and this is one section where you should verify rather than trust a page — check with the Equatoguinean embassy accredited to your country within a month of travelling, and do not rely on what a forum said last year.

This deserves its own section because it is the single most common way visitors get into trouble in Equatorial Guinea, and because the rules are stricter and more strictly enforced than in almost any other country a tourist is likely to visit.

Equatorial Guinea is, for a tourist, considerably safer than its reputation and considerably more complicated than most places. Violent crime against foreigners is not the issue. Bureaucracy, officialdom and health are.

Expensive — one of the most expensive countries in Africa relative to what you get, because the hospitality economy was built to charge oil companies rather than travellers, and those prices survived the decline in oil.

Equatorial Guinea is a country I would recommend to perhaps one traveller in a hundred, and to that one without hesitation. If your idea of a trip involves permits, a fixer, roadblocks, ten metres of rain and a multi-day walk into a crater to look for a colobus, this is one of the last places on Earth that will give you exactly that. If it does not, São Tomé is two hundred kilometres away, costs a third as much and is a genuinely lovely country.

The reason it is worth the effort is the Gran Caldera and the beaches at Ureca. There is very little intact tropical habitat left in the Gulf of Guinea and this is some of the best of it, protected largely by being extremely difficult to reach. Getting there requires money, patience and someone local who knows which permits are currently real.

And go with your eyes open about where you are. This is not a country that welcomes questions, and the people you meet have very good reasons for the answers they give and do not give. Take the photography rules seriously — they are the thing that turns a good trip into an incident. Do not perform curiosity about politics at people who cannot afford to satisfy it. Be a straightforwardly good guest, spend your money with guides and guesthouses rather than with hotels, and look at the forest.

— Radim Kaufmann