Gabon: Seven Attractions and Natural Wonders

The last Eden on the Atlantic

Gabon straddles the equator on the west coast of Central Africa, a country the size of the United Kingdom with only about 2.4 million people, most of them in Libreville and Port-Gentil. Nearly 90 percent of it is rainforest, and in 2002 the government turned roughly 11 percent of the national territory into 13 national parks in one stroke — an unusual bet on conservation and eco-tourism, funded partly by oil. This is where you can see lowland gorillas, forest elephants, and mandrills, and where elephants and hippos wander onto ocean beaches.

The seven below are almost all wilderness. Gabon is hot and humid year-round; the long dry season (June to September) is the easiest for travel and the best for whale-watching, while the shorter dry spell around December–January is good for wildlife in Loango.

1. Loango National Park

Loango, on the central coast, is Gabon's showpiece — the place made famous by photographs of elephants and buffalo on the surf line. A mosaic of beach, lagoon, papyrus swamp, savanna, and forest, it holds forest elephants, red river hogs, western lowland gorillas, and hippos that surf in the ocean, while humpback whales and dolphins pass offshore from July to September and leatherback and olive ridley turtles nest on the sand.

Access is by light aircraft and boat to a small number of lodges and camps; there are no roads inside.

2. Lopé National Park

Lopé, in the centre of the country, is the most accessible park — reached by the Trans-Gabon railway from Libreville. It protects a rare meeting of rainforest and grassy savanna left over from the last Ice Age, along with more than 1,500 Neolithic and Iron Age sites and rock engravings; the mix earned it UNESCO World Heritage status. Wildlife includes mandrills in enormous troops, forest elephants, buffalo, and sun-tailed monkeys.

There is a lodge near the railway station, making Lopé the easiest park for a first, shorter visit.

3. Ivindo National Park and Kongou Falls

Ivindo, in the northeast, is a park of black-water rivers and near-pristine rainforest, inscribed by UNESCO in 2021. Its centrepiece is Kongou Falls, a broad, multi-channel cataract where the Ivindo river breaks up and drops through the forest in a roar of white water — remote, hard to reach, and all the more impressive for it.

Reaching the falls means a train to Ivindo, a road transfer, and a pirogue journey with park staff.

4. Langoué Baï and the forest clearings

Deep inside Ivindo, a day's walk from the nearest camp, lies Langoué Baï — a marshy forest clearing "discovered" by researchers in 2000 where forest elephants, lowland gorillas, sitatunga antelope, and forest buffalo come out of the trees to feed on mineral-rich mud. Watched from a raised platform at dawn, it is one of the great wildlife experiences in Africa. The park's rivers also carry the Mingouli Falls, pictured here.

Visits are limited and organised through the park authority; expect basic camps and long forest walks.

5. Gorilla and mandrill tracking

Gabon offers one of the few places on earth to track western lowland gorillas — subtly different from the mountain gorillas of Rwanda and Uganda — with a habituated group in the forest inland from Loango. The country is also the great stronghold of the mandrill, the huge, blue-and-red-faced forest monkey that moves in "hordes" of several hundred, studied for decades in the Lopé area.

Both are strenuous, weather-dependent forest treks, arranged through lodges and the park service.

6. Libreville

Libreville, founded in 1849 as a settlement for people freed from a captured slave ship — hence the name — is a spread-out, humid capital along the Komo estuary. The draws are low-key: the National Museum of Arts and Traditions with its Kota reliquary figures and Fang masks, the Marché du Mont-Bouët, the seafront boulevard, the Saint-Michel church at Nkembo with its carved wooden pillars, and the nearby Arboretum de Sibang, a patch of primary forest inside the city.

It is the arrival point and the base for onward flights to the parks.

7. Pointe Denis and Pongara National Park

Directly across the estuary from Libreville, a 20-minute boat ride away, a narrow peninsula carries the weekend beaches of Pointe Denis and, at its tip, Pongara National Park — mangroves, coastal forest, and one of the most important leatherback turtle nesting beaches in the world (November to January). Elephants and buffalo sometimes appear on the sand here too, and humpback whales pass close in season.

It is the easiest nature escape from the capital, with a handful of lodges.

Gabon is a specialist wildlife destination: expensive, logistically demanding, and reliant on light aircraft and boats. A typical trip is 10 days to two weeks combining Loango with Lopé or Ivindo, arranged in advance through the parks agency or a specialist operator, with a night or two in Libreville at each end.