Yaoundé is the calm capital of an intense country. While Douala, on the coast, is Cameroon's noisy, sweltering economic engine, Yaoundé —inland, higher and cooler— is the city of political power, embassies and institutions, spread over seven green hills that give it a rolling, tree-lined profile that is unusual for an African capital. From its heights, the city looks like a sea of red roofs and white buildings among the greenery.
It isn't a city of great tourist monuments, but a place to take Cameroon's pulse: the National Museum housed in the former presidential palace, the overflowing markets, the modern churches perched on the hills, the ethnographic museums that bring together the art of the country's more than 250 peoples, and the viewpoints of Mont Fébé, from where you can take in the whole urban landscape. It is also the natural gateway to the great southern rainforest, the Dja Reserve and the villages of the interior.
This guide covers Yaoundé with a practical eye: what to see in the city and on its hills, how to get around in the yellow shared taxis, where to eat a good 'ndolé' (the national dish) or grilled fish, and how to use the capital as a logistics base for heading into deep Cameroon. With one or two well-planned days, Yaoundé stops being just an administrative stopover and becomes a warm, genuine introduction to the country.
Yaoundé was founded in 1888 as a German trading post and research station in the interior of what was then the protectorate of Kamerun, on the land of the Ewondo people, who gave the city its name ('Yaoundé' is a corruption of 'Ewondo'). During the First World War it passed into French hands, and the French made it the capital of their part of the territory; since independence and reunification in 1960-1961 it has been the capital of the Republic of Cameroon. Its history —from German outpost to capital of a bilingual country shaped by three colonial powers— is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The political heart of Cameroon: the capital spread over seven hills, in the land of the Beti-Ewondo, at the gateway to the great equatorial rainforest of the Dja and the Baka peoples.
Read the history of Centre: Yaoundé and the southern rainforest →If you book from here we earn a commission and you pay no more. Prices and availability come from Civitatis.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before any city existed, the seven hills where Yaoundé now spreads out were home to the Ewondo (or Yaunde) people, a Beti-Pahuin-speaking group who lived from farming and trade on the border between the equatorial forest to the south and the savannas of the centre. They are the ones who gave the future capital its name: 'Yaoundé' is simply the European form of the ethnonym 'Ewondo', as the first outsiders heard it and wrote it down.
That contact came with the Germans. In 1884 Germany had proclaimed the protectorate of Kamerun along the coast, and from there it began pushing inland in search of trade routes, ivory and rubber. In 1888 the German explorers and agents Georg Zenker and Curt Morgen founded a trading post and an agricultural research station on these hills, named Jaunde, right in the heart of Ewondo country. It was a strategic spot: at mid altitude (around 750 metres), with a healthier climate than the malaria-ridden coast, and at the hinge between the world of the forest and that of the savanna.
The post served as a base for the ivory and rubber trade and for colonial expansion towards the east and south. Experimental plantations, missions and a small administrative centre gradually grew up around the station. German Pallottine missionaries settled on the neighbouring hill of Mvolyé at the end of the 19th century, beginning the Catholic evangelisation that would leave a deep mark on the whole region. And so, from a German agricultural station on Ewondo land, the seed of the future capital began to take shape.
Yaoundé's fate, like that of all Cameroon, changed with the First World War. German Kamerun was one of the Reich's colonies in Africa, and when war broke out in 1914 it was invaded by British, French and Belgian troops from the neighbouring colonies. The Kamerun campaign was long and tough, fought largely in the forest; the German forces and their African troops fell back inland and held out until early 1916, when they finally withdrew to Spanish Guinea (today's Equatorial Guinea) and the colony fell into Allied hands.
After Germany's defeat, the League of Nations split the territory into two mandates: France took the larger part (eastern Cameroun) and Britain two western strips (the British Cameroons). Yaoundé ended up in the French zone, and the French, who had occupied the post during the war, made it the administrative capital of their mandate in 1922, replacing coastal Douala. The choice made sense: Yaoundé lay in the centre of the territory, at altitude and with a better climate, far from the humidity and diseases of the coast.
Under French rule, Yaoundé grew as a colonial city: avenues were laid out, administrative buildings, churches, schools and hospitals went up, and the city filled with civil servants, traders and workers from all over the country. The Catholic mission at Mvolyé grew into a major religious centre. Little by little, that forest outpost turned into a real capital, though still a modest one, of a territory under French tutelage.
The second half of the 20th century brought decolonisation, and Yaoundé was at the centre of that process. After the Second World War, the mandates became UN trust territories, and a strong nationalist movement grew in French Cameroon, led by the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon (UPC). The struggle for independence was partly violent: there was an uprising and harsh colonial repression, especially in Bassa and Bamileke country, in one of the bloodiest and least-known chapters of African decolonisation.
On 1 January 1960, French Cameroon became independent as the Republic of Cameroon, with Yaoundé as its capital and Ahmadou Ahidjo as its first president. The following year, in 1961, a referendum in the British Cameroons decided the future of the two English-speaking zones: the southern part voted to join the new republic (leading to Reunification), while the northern part chose to join Nigeria. This was the birth of today's Cameroon, a bilingual country forged from German, French and British legacies, whose union is celebrated by Yaoundé's great Reunification Monument.
As capital of the reunified nation, Yaoundé concentrated political power: the presidency, the government, Parliament and the embassies. Ahidjo ruled until 1982, when he was succeeded by Paul Biya, who would stay in power for decades. The city grew quickly, drawing people from every region and ethnic group in the country, and became a Cameroonian mosaic in miniature, even though the economic weight remained on Douala's side.
Since independence, Yaoundé's population has multiplied: from a city of a few tens of thousands of people in the mid-20th century, its metropolitan area now tops three or four million, making it one of the great cities of Central Africa. That dizzying growth overflowed the colonial layout: the city climbed its seven hills and spread across the valleys, mixing well-off residential neighbourhoods such as Bastos — home to the embassies — with dense working-class districts and areas of informal settlement.
As the political capital, Yaoundé hosts the institutions of the state, including the Palais de l'Unité (the presidency), the ministries and Parliament, as well as universities, leading hospitals and the headquarters of many organisations. It has also built up a rich collection of museums: the National Museum, housed since 2015 in Ahidjo's former presidential palace, and several private and ethnographic museums that bring together the art of the country's more than 250 peoples.
21st-century Yaoundé lives with Cameroon's great challenges: Paul Biya's long rule, tensions between the French-speaking regions and the English-speaking Northwest and Southwest — where a serious separatist conflict has been under way since 2016 — and security pressures in the Far North. Even so, the capital keeps a relatively calm and orderly feel amid the African bustle, with its cool highland climate, its green hills and its role as the institutional heart of a country so diverse it is nicknamed 'Africa in miniature'.
Yaoundé is known as 'the city of seven hills', just like Rome or Lisbon, because of the rolling terrain it sits on. That altitude — around 750 metres — gives it a milder, more bearable climate than stifling Douala on the coast, which was one of the reasons the French chose it as capital over the port.
The city's name keeps its indigenous origin: it comes from the Ewondo (or 'Yaunde') people, on whose land the German post was founded in 1888. Cameroon, for its part, owes its name to the Portuguese, who on reaching the estuary of the Wouri River in the 15th century found it full of prawns and called it 'Rio dos Camarões' (river of prawns), from which Cameroun, Cameroon and Camerún all derive.
Among the capital's symbols, the Reunification Monument stands out, with its spiralling arms representing the union of French-speaking and English-speaking Cameroon in 1961, along with the National Museum in the former presidential palace. Yaoundé is also a deeply Catholic city — the Mvolyé mission is one of the cradles of the country's evangelisation — and at the same time a melting pot of all Cameroon's ethnic groups and religions, reflecting a country that brings together, in a single territory, forest, savanna, mountains and Sahel, and more than 250 peoples and languages.
