Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL
Capital: Ouagadougou
Population: 24 million+
Language: Mooré, Dyula, Fula, Bissa (official), French and English.
1 – Arli National Park
Arli National Park, in Burkina Faso’s far south-east on the border with Benin, has been protected since 1954 and forms part of the W-Arly-Pendjari Complex, a UNESCO World Heritage Site shared with Benin and Niger.
Savanna woodland, gallery forest along the Arli and Pendjari rivers, and the Gobnangou sandstone cliffs shelter elephants, buffalo, roan antelope, hartebeest and the critically endangered West African lion.
According to UNESCO, the W-Arly-Pendjari Complex shelters about 85% of West Africa’s savanna elephants, in a wilderness that spans three national borders.
2 – Karfiguela Waterfalls
The Karfiguela Waterfalls, a series of tiered falls about 10 km from Banfora, lie in the Cascades region of south-western Burkina Faso.
The falls are reached through sugarcane fields and drop in stages into rocky pools, while the jagged Sindou Peaks and the hippos of Lake Tengréla lie within reach of Banfora.
Close by stand the Dômes de Fabédougou, beehive-shaped sandstone domes whose rock is, by some accounts, nearly two billion years old, carved by wind and water into their strange shapes.
3 – Ouagadougou
Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso’s capital and largest city, has been a Mossi royal capital since the 15th century, and its kings outlasted French conquest and helped win back Upper Volta in 1947, after France had broken up the colony in 1932.
Come on a Friday morning for the Moro-Naba ceremony at the palace, a brief ritual in which the king appears in warrior red, then returns in white for peace, and in odd-numbered years the city fills in late February and early March for FESPACO, often called Africa’s largest film festival.
Thomas Sankara seized power in 1983 and on 4 August 1984 renamed Upper Volta as Burkina Faso, joining Mooré and Dioula words into a name meaning roughly “land of upright people”, before he was killed in Ouagadougou on 15 October 1987 in the coup that brought Blaise Compaoré to power.
4 – Ziniare Wildlife Park
Ziniaré Wildlife Park lies about 35 km north-east of Ouagadougou at Ziniaré, the hometown of Blaise Compaoré, who ruled Burkina Faso for 27 years until a popular uprising forced him out in 2014.
Lions, hippos and ostriches roam in semi-freedom, and the open-air granite sculptures of Laongo, carved at symposiums held since 1988, lie nearby.
Closely associated with Compaoré, the park was left to decline after his fall, and after years of neglect its surviving animals were rescued and the park reopened.
5 – Lake Bam
Lake Bam, often described as Burkina Faso’s largest natural lake, stretches some 15–20 km near Kongoussi, north of Ouagadougou, on the edge of the Sahel, and is a lifeline for the farmers, fishers and herders along its shores.
Its green fringe of irrigated market gardens is alive with birdlife, and Lake Bam and the smaller Lake Dem to the south-east have both been Ramsar wetlands of international importance since 2009.
Market gardens along Lake Bam’s shores grew green beans for tables in Paris and across Europe, though silting has steadily reduced the lake’s depth.
6 – Tiébélé
Tiébélé, about 15 km from the Ghana border, is home to the Kassena, believed to have settled here by the 15th century, and to the Royal Court of Tiébélé, founded in the early 16th century and made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2024.
The Royal Court is a cluster of houses of earth, wood, straw and cow dung whose shape shows who lives inside, round for young unmarried men, figure-eight for elders and rectangular for couples, with doorways about 1 m high and a low wall inside to stop raiders.
The painting is women’s work, done in the dry season before the rains with red laterite, white chalk and black mineral pigment, then sealed with a varnish boiled from the pods of the néré tree that protects both the paint and the walls.
7 – Ruins of Loropéni
The Ruins of Loropéni, about 40 km west of Gaoua in the far south-west, are laterite walls up to 6 m high enclosing about a hectare, the best preserved of ten fortresses in a group of around 100 stone enclosures.
Walk the walls, with trees growing straight out of the ramparts and the site only partly excavated, then head to Gaoua, whose Musée de Poni covers the surrounding Lobi country.
Burkina Faso’s first World Heritage Site (2009), Loropéni was probably built by the Lohron or Koulango peoples, who controlled gold extraction in the region, and radiocarbon dating has pushed its origins back to at least the 11th century, though no one knows for certain what it was for.