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Capital: Bangui
Population: 5.5 million+
Language: French, Sango
1 – Dzanga-Sangha Reserve (above)
The Dzanga-Sangha Reserve, in the far south-western tip of the Central African Republic where it meets Cameroon and Congo, protects a vast stretch of the Congo Basin, the world’s second-largest tropical rainforest, and its Dzanga-Ndoki National Park forms part of the Sangha Trinational UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Its centrepiece is Dzanga Bai, a huge forest clearing nicknamed “the village of elephants”, where forest elephants gather to drink and dig for minerals, while BaAka hunter-gatherers, expert trackers of the forest, guide visitors to habituated western lowland gorillas.
Forest elephants are so elusive beneath the canopy that they were barely studied until Andrea Turkalo began watching Dzanga Bai in 1990, eventually identifying more than 4,000 individuals, largely by the shapes and markings of their ears and tusks.
2 – Boali Falls
Boali Falls, the country’s best-known natural landmark, is a broad curtain of water some 50 m high and 250 m wide on the Mbali River, about 100 km north-west of Bangui.
The falls are at their fullest in the rainy season, when water thunders across the full width of the rocky cliffs, and since the mid-1950s the river has powered hydroelectric plants that supply Bangui, with a second plant added in 1976.
Because a dam upstream controls the flow, Boali Falls run to a timetable, and water has traditionally been released over the edge on Sundays for visitors.
3 – Bamingui-Bangoran National Park
Bamingui-Bangoran National Park, a vast wilderness of wooded savanna, grassland and gallery forest on a plateau in northern CAR, was created in 1933, originally to protect the black rhino, and was later recognised as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.
Threaded by the Bamingui and Bangoran rivers, the park has long been home to elephants, lions, leopards, buffalo, roan antelope and hippos, though their numbers have been badly depleted, and it records more than 350 bird species.
Within the park complex lies the Vassako-Bolo Strict Nature Reserve, created in 1960, a “réserve intégrale” closed to virtually all human activity and left entirely to nature.
4 – Manovo-Gounda National Park
Manovo-Gounda St Floris National Park, some 17,400 km² of floodplain, plain and plateau in northern CAR along the border with Chad, is the largest savanna park in West and Central Africa, and its wealth of wildlife earned it UNESCO World Heritage status in 1988.
Its savannas once held black rhino, large elephant herds and one of the region’s few populations of the critically endangered Kordofan giraffe, but armed poachers may have taken as much as 80% of the park’s wildlife, and the last rhinos had gone by about 2005.
Manovo-Gounda sits at a natural crossroads between East and West Africa, and between the Sahel and the forested tropics, which gives it an unusually mixed cast of species.
5 – Bangui
Bangui, strung along the north bank of the Ubangi River facing DR Congo, was founded by the French in June 1889 at the rapids that gave it its name, and became the capital of the colony of Ubangi-Shari, which rallied to Free France in late August 1940.
The Boganda National Museum honours Barthélemy Boganda, the colony’s first Catholic priest turned nationalist leader, who died in a plane crash in March 1959, months before independence, and in November 1940 Bangui raised the Free French battalion that fought at Bir Hakeim and became the first land unit made a Companion of the Liberation.
On 4 December 1977 Jean-Bédel Bokassa had himself crowned Emperor of Central Africa in Bangui in a ceremony modelled on Napoleon’s, with a gilded eagle throne and a diamond-encrusted crown, at a cost of more than $20 million, estimated at a quarter to a third of the national budget, and he was deposed less than two years later.