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Capital: Bangui
Population: 5.4 million+
Language: French/Sango
1 – Dzanga-Sangha Reserve (above)
In the far southwestern tip of CAR, where the country meets Cameroon and Congo, Dzanga-Sangha protects a vast stretch of the Congo Basin — the second-largest rainforest on Earth — as part of the UNESCO-listed Sangha Trinational.
Its centrepiece is Dzanga Bai, a huge forest clearing nicknamed “the village of elephants,” where scores of rare forest elephants gather to drink and dig for minerals; nearby you can track habituated western lowland gorillas and spend time with the BaAka, master hunter-gatherers of the forest.
Forest elephants are so elusive beneath the canopy that they were barely studied until Dzanga Bai opened a window on them — over the decades, researchers here have identified more than 3,000 individuals by the shape of their ears and tusks.
2 – Boali Falls
The country’s best-known natural landmark, a broad curtain of water some 50m high and 250m wide tumbling over a schist cliff on the M’Bali River, about 95km northwest of the capital, Bangui; since the 1950s its river has powered the dams that keep Bangui’s lights on.
In the rainy season the falls thunder across the full width of the cliff; a steep staircase leads to plunge pools at the base, a cable “liana bridge” crosses the river above, and a nearby crocodile lake and clifftop restaurant round out a popular day trip from the capital.
Because a hydroelectric dam upstream controls the flow, the falls run to a timetable — they’re at their fullest at weekends, when more water is released over the edge.
3 – Bamingui-Bangoran National Park
A vast wilderness of wooded savanna, grassland and river-fringing gallery forest on a plateau in northern CAR — one of the country’s two oldest national parks, dating to the 1930s, and a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.
Threaded by the Bamingui and Bangoran rivers, the park has long been prime country for elephants, lions, leopards, buffalo, roan antelope and hippos, with more than 300 bird species; the dry season opens up the tracks for game viewing.
At its heart lies the Vassako Bolo Strict Nature Reserve — a “réserve intégrale” so strictly protected that it’s kept off-limits to virtually all human activity, left entirely to nature.
4 – Manovo-Gounda National Park
The largest savanna national park in West and Central Africa — some 17,400 km² of floodplain, plain and plateau in remote northeastern CAR near the Chad and Sudan borders; its extraordinary wealth of wildlife earned it UNESCO World Heritage status in 1988.
Its savannas once held one of Africa’s great gatherings of big game, including black rhino, elephants and the last giraffes in Central Africa. Up to 80% of Manovo-Gounda’s wildlife was lost due to poaching; wiping out the park’s rhino, and the western black rhino was declared globally extinct in 2011
Manovo-Gounda sits at a rare natural crossroads — a meeting point where the wildlife of the East African savannas, the West African plains and the Congo Basin forests all overlap, giving it an unusually mixed cast of species.
5 – Bangui
Strung along the north bank of the Ubangi River facing the Congo, Bangui was founded in 1889 as a French post at the point where rapids halt the boats — which is where its name comes from — and grew into the capital of the colony of Ubangi-Shari and then of the republic imagined by Barthélemy Boganda, the priest turned politician who founded the country and died in a plane crash in March 1959, months before it became independent.
The Boganda National Museum holds the main collections from a country of some eighty peoples; beyond it are the red-brick Notre-Dame cathedral, the sprawl of the PK5 market, and the riverfront itself, where pirogues cross to the far bank and the rapids run below the city.
On 4 December 1977, Jean-Bédel Bokassa had himself crowned Emperor of Central Africa here in a ceremony modelled on Napoleon’s, complete with a gilded eagle throne and a diamond-encrusted crown, at a cost put by various estimates at somewhere between a fifth and a third of the national budget; he was overthrown less than two years later.