Sascha Grabow / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL
Capital: Moroni
Population: 880,000+
Language: Comorian (Shikomor), French and Arabic
1 – Moroni (also above)
Moroni, the capital and largest town of the Comoros, lies on the south-west coast of Grande Comore in the shadow of the Karthala volcano, was probably founded by Arabic-speaking settlers, possibly as early as the 10th century, and replaced Dzaoudzi on Mayotte as capital in 1958.
Moroni’s medina, one of six inscribed by UNESCO in 2026 as the Medinas of the Historic Sultanates of the Comoros, centres on the Old Friday Mosque, built in 1427 with a minaret added in 1921, while the National Museum covers the islands’ history, volcanoes, sea and peoples.
Independence was declared in Moroni on 6 July 1975, and within weeks the French mercenary Bob Denard helped topple the first president, Ahmed Abdallah, the start of two decades of coups and interventions that ended only when French troops seized Denard in 1995.
2 – Moheli Marine Park
Mohéli Marine Park, set around Mohéli, the smallest of the Comoros’ main islands, became the country’s first protected area in 2001, and its coral reefs, seagrass beds, mangroves and seabird islets are co-managed with local villages.
Its warm, shallow waters hold one of the largest green-turtle nesting sites in the Indian Ocean, with turtles coming ashore year-round at Itsamia, rare dugongs grazing the seagrass and humpback whales passing between July and November.
Mohéli and neighbouring Anjouan are the only home of Livingstone’s fruit bat, a critically endangered giant with a wingspan of up to about 1.4 m.
3 – Karthala Volcano
Karthala, at 2,361 m the highest point in the Comoros and one of Africa’s most active volcanoes, is the larger, southern of the two shield volcanoes that make up Grande Comore, and has erupted more than 20 times since the 19th century.
Climbers make the ascent in a long day or two, through rainforest and heath of giant heather to bare lava at the rim, passing slopes where, in 1977, a lava flow ran through the village of Singani to the sea.
Karthala’s summit caldera, about 3 by 4 km across, has held both a crater lake, which formed after the 1991 eruption, and a lava lake that appeared in late 2005, the year its ash fell on Moroni.
4 – Lake Dzialandzé
Lake Dzialandzé, a crater lake high on the flank of Mount Ntringui, the highest peak on Anjouan, is the island’s largest body of fresh water, a Ramsar wetland since 2006 and part of Mount Ntringui National Park.
Reaching Lake Dzialandzé means a steep hike of a few hours through some of the last mountain forest on an island where much of the woodland has been cleared, with ylang-ylang plantations on the lower slopes.
Those forests are the only home of the Anjouan scops owl, a small owl unrecorded for more than a century after 1886, until it was rediscovered in 1992.
5 – Mutsamudu
Mutsamudu, the capital of Anjouan on its north-west coast, is a centuries-old Swahili port whose medina became part of the Comoros’ first UNESCO World Heritage listing in 2026.
Wander its narrow lanes of stone houses and carved doors to the Ujumbe, the sultans’ palace built in the late 18th century under Sultan Abdallah I, and up to the citadel, built with British help on the hill above the harbour.
The citadel guarded Mutsamudu against Malagasy raiders, Betsimisaraka and Sakalava war fleets that attacked the Comoros from the 1790s and carried off captives, and in 1720 the Irish-born pirate Edward England fought a bloody battle off Anjouan against the East India Company ship Cassandra.
6 – Cœlacanth National Park
Cœlacanth National Park protects the steep volcanic slopes and submerged caves off south-west Grande Comore that shelter the coelacanth, a fish known from fossils up to 400 million years old and thought to have died out with the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago.
There is little to see, as the fish rest by day in lava caves roughly 150–250 m down and go deeper at night to hunt, but the fishing villages along this coast are where, for generations, coelacanths were hooked by accident on deep handlines set for oilfish.
After the coelacanth’s rediscovery off South Africa in 1938, a second specimen was landed off Anjouan in December 1952, though Comorian fishermen had long known the fish, which they call gombessa, and the national football team is nicknamed after it.