Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL
Capital: Bissau
Population: 2.2 million+
Language: Portuguese/Kriol
1 – Bijagos Islands (also above)
Scattered off the coast of Guinea-Bissau, the Bijagós are one of West Africa’s great secrets — an archipelago of 88 low, green islands, mangroves and sandbanks so rich in life that the whole group is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve; barely a quarter are even inhabited.
Reached by boat from the capital, they’re a wilderness of palm-fringed beaches and warm, shallow seas alive with dolphins, manatees, rays and marine turtles — indeed the most important green-turtle nesting grounds in all of Africa, where thousands haul ashore to lay their eggs each year.
The islands are home to the Bijagó people, who keep one of Africa’s few matriarchal societies — women own the land and the houses, run the economy and settle disputes, it’s the women who choose their husbands, and the community’s spiritual life is led by priestesses.
2 – Bolama
An island in the Bijagós that was the very first capital of Portuguese Guinea, from 1879 until 1941 — a grand little colonial city that, once the capital moved to Bissau, was left to be slowly swallowed by the jungle. The island’s colonial fate was actually arbitrated by US President Ulysses S. Grant in 1870, there’s a statue of him there.
Today Bolama is a hauntingly beautiful ghost town of crumbling grand buildings draped in vines — among them a governor’s palace, a cathedral, the rusting iron skeleton of West Africa’s first telegraph office, and a neoclassical town hall modelled on the grandeur of Washington — so atmospheric it’s been called a “colonial Angkor Wat.”
Many of the abandoned mansions are now home to colonies of giant fruit bats, which pour out of the ruined rooms each evening in clouds thick enough to darken the sky.
3 – Orango Islands
The largest and most celebrated of the Bijagós, Orango is a national park of savanna, palm groves and mangrove-lined lagoons in the archipelago’s southwest — and the seat of the Bijagó royal line, whose last great queen, Okinka Pampa, lies in a sacred mausoleum on the island.
Reaching the island’s heart means a boat trip through mangrove channels and a walk across the grasslands to the Anôr lagoon — passing crocodiles, parrots and migrating birds — to find its most extraordinary residents wallowing in the shallows.
Orango is one of the only places on Earth with saltwater hippos — a rare population that shelters in the freshwater lagoon by day, then lumbers down to the beach at dusk to swim and bathe in the salty sea, an adaptation seen almost nowhere else in the world.
4 – Cantanhez Forest National Park
In the far south of Guinea-Bissau, close to the border with Guinea, Cantanhez protects the largest surviving stretch of rainforest in the country — a mosaic of jungle, palm forest, savanna and mangrove that is one of the last refuges for West Africa’s vanishing forest wildlife.
Reached down a rough forest track, it’s above all a place to track chimpanzees on foot with local guides, among a scattering of villages where farmers and apes share the same land; red colobus and other monkeys fill the canopy, and a tiny, elusive herd of forest elephants still roams the trees.
These are the westernmost chimpanzees on Earth — living at the very edge of the great apes’ range — and they’re famous among scientists for their “culture,” fashioning sticks into tools to dip for wild honey, a skill handed down and varying from one community to the next.
5 – Bissau
Set on the wide Geba estuary, Bissau grew from a Portuguese fort of the 1680s into a trading town, and became the capital in 1941 when the administration finally gave up on Bolama — today it holds a quarter of the country’s people and almost all of its history since.
Bissau Velho is the old quarter, a grid of ochre Portuguese buildings sliding gently into ruin between the port and the market at Bandim; above the water stands the Fortaleza de São José da Amura, still a working barracks, and inside its walls lies the mausoleum of Amílcar Cabral.
Cabral — agronomist, poet and one of the sharpest political thinkers Africa produced last century — founded the PAIGC and ran a liberation war so successful that by the early 1970s his movement governed most of the countryside with its own schools and clinics; he was shot dead in Conakry in January 1973, months before independence, and the war he built helped topple the Portuguese dictatorship itself the following year.
6 – Cacheu
Two hours north of the capital, on the river that shares its name, Cacheu was fortified in 1588 and is among the oldest European settlements anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa — for most of the 17th and 18th centuries it served as the official Portuguese slaving station for the whole Upper Guinea coast, the place where the crown made certain its duties were paid.
The stone fort raised in the 1640s still stands at the river mouth with its cannon pointing out over the water, kept up largely by the townspeople themselves; around it are a small church, a modest museum, and the mangrove channels of the Tarafes de Cacheu park.
Inside those walls stands an odd assembly: the statues of Portuguese explorers and governors that once presided over public squares, taken down after independence and set here in the courtyard — so the men who ran the trade now stand together in a corner of the fort, facing the river the ships sailed down.