Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL
Capital: Libreville
Population: 2.5 million+
Language: French
1 – Loango National Park (also above)
Loango National Park, created in 2002 on Gabon’s wild Atlantic coast, is a mosaic of white-sand beaches, lagoons, savanna and rainforest that the conservationist Mike Fay dubbed “Africa’s Last Eden”.
Elephants, buffalo, hippos and even gorillas venture out of the forest onto Loango’s beaches, while humpback whales and dolphins pass offshore.
Loango is best known for its “surfing hippos”, photographed wallowing in the Atlantic breakers by the National Geographic photographer Michael “Nick” Nichols.
2 – Libreville
Libreville, Gabon’s capital on the Gabon Estuary, grew from a settlement founded in 1849 by captives freed from the Brazilian slave ship L’Elizia, seized by the French navy in 1846, and on 10 November 1940 it fell to Free French forces in the Battle of Gabon.
Its name, “free town”, echoes Freetown in Sierra Leone, and its sights include the Church of St Michael at Nkembo, with 31 carved wooden pillars of Bible scenes by the sculptor Zéphyrin Lendogno, and Mont-Bouët, the country’s biggest market.
Fang carvings from Gabon helped shape modern art, for the Fang mask André Derain bought from Maurice de Vlaminck in 1905, held by the Centre Pompidou, was among the African works that fed into Cubism.
3 – Lope National Park
Lopé National Park, in the heart of Gabon where rainforest meets rolling grassland, protects relict savannas, survivors of drier ice-age climates, and was listed by UNESCO in 2007 for a human story stretching back some 400,000 years.
Lopé’s forests shelter gorillas, chimpanzees and forest elephants, while its rocky outcrops hold some 1,800 prehistoric rock carvings, one of the great collections of rock art in Central Africa.
Lopé is famed for its mandrills, the rainbow-faced monkeys whose hordes here average more than 600 and sometimes top 1,000, the largest natural primate groups known.
4 – Pointe-Denis Beach
Pointe-Denis, a long ribbon of white sand on the Pongara peninsula across the Gabon Estuary from Libreville, is the capital’s favourite beach escape, a short boat ride from the city.
Days at Pointe-Denis are spent swimming and lazing at beach bars, with humpback whales sometimes passing offshore and the mangroves and forest of Pongara National Park close by.
Pongara’s beaches are a major nesting ground for the leatherback, the largest turtle on Earth, and Gabon hosts the world’s largest nesting population of the species.
5 – Lambaréné
Lambaréné, on an island in the broad Ogooué River about 230 km from Libreville, is where Albert Schweitzer, organist, theologian and a doctor at 38, founded a hospital in 1913 and worked until his death in 1965, winning the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize, though critics have long faulted his paternalism.
Schweitzer’s former home at Lambaréné has become a museum of his belongings, he lies buried beside his wife Helene above the river, and the hospital that bears his name treats patients in buildings opened in 1981.
In 1915, travelling on the Ogooué, Schweitzer said the phrase “reverence for life” came to him at sunset as his boat passed a herd of hippos, and in November 1940 Lambaréné’s Vichy garrison surrendered to the Free French.
6 – Ivindo National Park
Ivindo National Park, wrapped around the Ivindo River in Gabon’s north-east, protects some of the least disturbed rainforest in the Congo Basin, in a country about 88% forest, and UNESCO listed it in 2021.
Kongou Falls, a broad wall of white water breaking over rock in the jungle, is the showpiece of Ivindo, while deeper in, elephants, gorillas, buffalo and sitatunga step out to feed at Langoué Baï, a marshy forest clearing.
The conservationist Mike Fay brought Langoué Baï to the world’s attention in 2000 on his 15-month Megatransect walk across the Congo Basin, and in 2002, influenced partly by his findings, President Omar Bongo created 13 national parks covering about a tenth of Gabon.