Explore Africa

South Africa Guide →

Thrilling Big Five safaris, Table Mountain's iconic silhouette above Cape Town, the Winelands and the dramatic Garden Route — South Africa offers extraordinary diversity in one country.

Egypt Guide →

The Great Pyramids of Giza, the temples of Luxor, cruising the Nile by felucca and diving the Red Sea reefs — Egypt is the world's greatest open-air museum.

Morocco Guide →

The labyrinthine souks of Marrakesh, the blue city of Chefchaouen, Saharan dune camps and the Atlantic surf of Taghazout make Morocco one of the world's most atmospheric destinations.

Tunisia Guide →

Roman Carthage, the medina of Tunis, Saharan desert landscapes, the whitewashed village of Sidi Bou Said overlooking the Mediterranean — Tunisia is North Africa's most accessible destination.

Kenya

The Maasai Mara's Great Migration, Mount Kilimanjaro on the horizon, Lamu's Swahili old town and world-class safari camps that set the global standard for wildlife tourism.

Tanzania

The Serengeti's endless plains, the snow-capped summit of Kilimanjaro, Zanzibar's spice-scented old stone town and some of the finest big-game safari experiences on earth.

Algeria

Africa's largest country encompasses the Roman ruins of Djémila, the Sahara's towering Tadrart Acacus rock formations and the beautiful Ottoman-era Casbah of Algiers.

Angola

Oil-rich and rarely visited, with Portuguese colonial Luanda, the Kalandula waterfalls and desert where the Namib runs north across the border.

Benin

The birthplace of Vodun, with the stilt village of Ganvié built over a lagoon and the royal palaces of Abomey recording a kingdom that traded in slaves and gold.

Botswana

The Okavango Delta floods in the dry season from rain that fell in Angola, creating a wetland in the Kalahari and some of the best game viewing anywhere.

Burkina Faso

The Sahel's cultural centre, with FESPACO — Africa's largest film festival — held in Ouagadougou every two years, and the Sindou Peaks rising out of the savannah in the southwest.

Burundi

One of the smallest and least-visited countries in Africa, with drumming traditions recognised by UNESCO and a shoreline on Lake Tanganyika.

Cameroon

Often called Africa in miniature, with rainforest, savannah, desert and Mount Cameroon in one country, plus the wooden palaces of the Bamileke chiefdoms.

Cape Verde

Ten Atlantic islands off West Africa, with Portuguese Creole culture, the morna music Cesária Évora carried worldwide, and Pico do Fogo rising from a volcanic caldera.

Central African Republic

Dzanga-Sangha's forest clearings draw hundreds of elephants and habituated lowland gorillas, but instability has kept the Central African Republic effectively closed for years.

Chad

The Ennedi Massif's sandstone arches and rock art, and Zakouma's restored elephant herds — Chad is remote, difficult and spectacular.

Comoros

Three volcanic islands between Madagascar and the mainland, producing much of the world's ylang-ylang, with Karthala's crater among the largest active calderas anywhere.

Congo

The Republic of Congo protects Nouabalé-Ndoki, some of the least disturbed rainforest on earth, where lowland gorillas and forest elephants gather in open clearings.

Cote d'Ivoire

Yamoussoukro's basilica is larger than St Peter's, and Côte d'Ivoire's lagoon beaches and Taï rainforest see a fraction of the visitors they could.

Democratic Republic of the Congo

Vast, mineral-rich and difficult, the DRC holds Virunga — Africa's oldest national park — with mountain gorillas and the lava lake of Nyiragongo.

Cape Town

Table Mountain above a city between two oceans, with penguins at Boulders, vineyards inland and the Cape of Good Hope an hour south.

Marrakesh

The Jemaa el-Fna fills with food stalls and storytellers at dusk, behind a medina of souks, riads and the Koutoubia minaret.

Cairo

The Giza pyramids on the city edge, the Grand Egyptian Museum holding Tutankhamun's full collection, and a medieval Islamic quarter most visitors never reach.

Serengeti & Ngorongoro

Two million wildebeest and zebra move through here each year, and the Ngorongoro crater holds the densest concentration of predators in Africa.

Victoria Falls

A kilometre and a half of river falling 108 metres, throwing spray visible from 50 kilometres — the locals call it the smoke that thunders.

Zanzibar

Stone Town's carved doors and spice markets, with white-sand beaches, dhow sailing and a history as the Indian Ocean's slave and clove entrepôt.

Maasai Mara

The Kenyan end of the great migration, where the herds cross the Mara river against the crocodiles between July and October.

Luxor

Karnak and the Valley of the Kings face each other across the Nile — more concentrated pharaonic monument than anywhere else on earth.

Fez

The oldest and largest car-free urban area in the world, with a 9th-century university and tanneries still working the same stone pits.

Okavango Delta

A river that never reaches the sea, spreading into the Kalahari and drawing elephant, lion and wild dog to water in the middle of a desert.

Kruger National Park

Two million hectares, self-drivable, and the most accessible place in Africa to see all of the big five without a guide.

Nairobi

The only capital with a national park inside the city limits, and the hub for almost all East African safari travel.

Addis Ababa

Ethiopia's capital at 2,350 metres, with the fossil Lucy in the National Museum, Africa's largest market, and the continent's best coffee ritual.

Tunis & Carthage

A UNESCO medina beside the ruins Rome spent three wars destroying, with Sidi Bou Saïd's blue-and-white cliffs a tram ride away.

Sossusvlei

Rust-orange dunes up to 300 metres high in the world's oldest desert, with the dead camelthorn trees of Deadvlei standing in a white clay pan.

Stone Town

A maze of coral-stone alleys where Arab, Persian, Indian and African influences met, and where Freddie Mercury was born.

Volcanoes National Park

Rwanda's Virunga slopes, where Dian Fossey worked and where an hour with a mountain gorilla family is the most expensive permit in Africa.

Essaouira

A walled Atlantic port of blue boats and ramparts, cooler and windier than Marrakesh, with a gnawa music festival each June.

Aswan & Abu Simbel

Nubian villages on the Nile and the temples Ramesses II cut into a cliff, moved block by block in the 1960s to escape the rising lake.

Johannesburg

The Apartheid Museum and Soweto tell the country's recent history directly, and the Cradle of Humankind's fossil caves lie an hour northwest.

Lalibela

Eleven churches cut downward out of solid rock in the 12th century and still in daily use — the most extraordinary buildings in Africa.

Chefchaouen

A Rif mountain town painted in a hundred shades of blue, small enough to walk in an afternoon and photographed relentlessly.

Seychelles

Granite boulders on white sand at Anse Source d'Argent, and Aldabra's atoll holding more giant tortoises than the Galápagos.

Livingstone

The Zambian side of Victoria Falls, with Devil's Pool at the lip of the drop when the water is low enough to swim to it.

Dakar

West Africa's cultural capital, with a mbalax music scene, the pink lake outside town and Gorée Island's slave house offshore.

Giza, Saqqara and Dahshur together: the Great Pyramid is the only one of the seven ancient wonders still standing, built around 2560 BC.

The stage for the largest terrestrial mammal migration on earth — around two million wildebeest, zebra and gazelle moving in an annual circuit.

The largest sheet of falling water anywhere, shared with Zimbabwe, generating a permanent rainforest in its own spray.

Founded in 1070 as an Almoravid capital, with the Koutoubia, the Saadian tombs and a square that has functioned as an open-air theatre for nine centuries.

Eleven monolithic churches carved downward into volcanic rock in the 12th and 13th centuries as a New Jerusalem, still in continuous worship.

A collapsed caldera holding 25,000 large animals year-round, plus Olduvai Gorge, where the Leakeys found some of the oldest hominin remains.

Karnak, Luxor, the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens — the religious capital of Egypt at the height of its power.

A prison island off Cape Town where Nelson Mandela spent eighteen of his twenty-seven years, with tours often led by former inmates.

The thousandth site inscribed, in 2014 — an inland delta whose annual flood arrives in the dry season, months after the rain that caused it.

Founded in the 9th century and holding al-Qarawiyyin, generally recognised as the oldest continuously operating university in the world.

A small island off Dakar that served as a slave-trading post for four centuries, and now as a memorial to the Atlantic trade.

Six Madagascan parks holding species that evolved in isolation for 60 million years — lemurs among them — and on the danger list since 2010.

A stone city of the 11th to 15th centuries, built without mortar, whose existence colonial authorities spent decades trying to attribute to anyone but Africans.

The Phoenician city Rome destroyed in 146 BC and rebuilt as its second city in the west, now scattered across a Tunis suburb.

The Great Mosque is the largest mud-brick building on earth, replastered each year by the whole town in a single day's communal work.

A Swahili coastal trading town where African, Arab, Indian and European influences fused, and the last open slave market in the world closed in 1873.

A Saharan intellectual capital of the 15th and 16th centuries, whose manuscript libraries were smuggled out to Bamako to save them in 2012.

The Cradle of Humankind, whose dolomite caves have produced a third of all early hominin fossils ever found, including Mrs Ples and Little Foot.

A forest of limestone blades eroded into needles sharp enough to cut through boots, sheltering lemurs in the canyons between them.

An intact 1930s Italian modernist city centre — including a service station shaped like an aeroplane — built as a colonial showpiece and never redeveloped.

Remote enough to have escaped almost all human interference, with around 100,000 giant tortoises — the largest population anywhere.

One of the oldest Islamic cities in the world, with mosques, madrasas and fountains from the 10th century onward packed into a dense medieval quarter.

The only coastal desert whose dunes are shaped by fog rather than rivers, with an ecosystem of beetles and plants that drink from the sea mist.

Fortified mud tower-houses in northern Togo, built and still lived in as a landscape where architecture, farming and belief are inseparable.

The Kushite capital, with more pyramids than the whole of Egypt — steeper, smaller and standing almost entirely alone in the desert.