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Capital: Ciudad de la Paz
Population: 1.9 million+
Language: Spanish, French, Portuguese
1 – Malabo (above)
Malabo, on the north coast of volcanic Bioko Island, was founded by the British in 1827 as Port Clarence, a base against the slave trade, became the Spanish colonial capital of Santa Isabel, and was the national capital for more than half a century after independence in 1968.
Its old centre keeps the twin-towered Cathedral of Santa Isabel, completed in 1916, the Presidential Palace and pastel plazas, while oil wealth has raised new towers along the harbour beneath the forested slopes of Pico Basilé.
On the night of 14 January 1942 British commandos slipped into Malabo’s harbour, then Santa Isabel, in neutral Spanish territory and towed away the Italian liner Duchessa d’Aosta and a German tug without a shot fired, a raid that inspired Guy Ritchie’s film The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024).
2 – Bata
Bata, Equatorial Guinea’s largest city, is the bustling Atlantic port and economic heart of the mainland region of Río Muni, between Cameroon and Gabon.
Life centres on the palm-lined seafront promenade and the Torre de la Libertad, opened for Independence Day in 2011 with a revolving restaurant at the top, and the city is the springboard for the gorillas, chimpanzees and forest elephants of Monte Alén National Park.
Deep in the rainforest beyond Bata the government has built a new capital from scratch, Ciudad de la Paz, the “City of Peace”, which a January 2026 decree made the country’s official capital.
3 – Annobón
Annobón, a 17 km² extinct volcano in the Atlantic some 600–670 km south-west of Bioko and closer to São Tomé than to the rest of its own country, was named Ano Bom, “Good Year”, by Portuguese navigators who, by tradition, reached it on New Year’s Day.
A green crater lake, Lago A Pot, lies near the island’s summit amid forest home to birds found nowhere else, and its population of about 5,000 lives mainly in the little capital of San Antonio de Palé.
Settled with enslaved Africans brought from Angola by way of São Tomé, and handed to Spain under the Treaty of El Pardo in 1778, Annobón developed its own language, Fa d’Ambô, a Portuguese creole, so on this speck of Africa’s only Spanish-speaking state people talk in a tongue all their own.
4 – Bioko Island
Bioko, Equatorial Guinea’s largest island, rises from the Gulf of Guinea in rainforested volcanic peaks crowned by Pico Basilé, at 3,011 m the highest peak on any Gulf of Guinea island, and as Fernando Po it was a British anti-slavery base where the Coleraine-born Royal Marines officer Edward Nicolls served as superintendent in the late 1820s and early 1830s.
Its misty rainforests shelter seven species of monkey, several found nowhere else, including the Bioko drill and Pennant’s red colobus, and hikers climb Pico Basilé for sweeping views across the island.
On the black-sand beaches of the south coast near Ureca, four species of sea turtle, leatherback, green, olive ridley and hawksbill, come ashore to nest, making Bioko one of the most important turtle nesting sites in the Gulf of Guinea.