Before it was a country, Ivory Coast was —and still is— an extraordinary crossroads of peoples. Its territory, which runs down from the northern savannas to the rainforest and the coast of the Gulf of Guinea, was settled over centuries by migrations arriving from every direction, and today it recognises more than sixty ethnic groups gathered into four major cultural and linguistic families.
In the southeast and centre settled the Akan peoples, among them the Baoulé and the Anyi (Agni), related to the Ashanti of present-day Ghana and mostly arriving in relatively late waves, between the 17th and 18th centuries. In the west and southwest, in the mountains and the forest, live the Kru peoples —Bété, Guéré, Dan (Yacouba), Wè—, forest hunters and farmers famous for their masks. Across the northwest and north-centre stretch the Mandé peoples, divided between the northern Mandé (the Dyula or Juula, Muslim traders) and the southern Mandé; and in the savanna of the northeast the Senufo dominate, farmers, weavers and sculptors.
That diversity was no accident, but the result of the territory's position as a hinge between the Sahel and the Atlantic. Goods, religions and languages passed through here, and each people left its mark. The same variety that makes Ivorian culture so rich would, centuries later, become one of the fault lines that colonialism and modern politics would learn to strain and manipulate.
On top of that human mosaic, remarkable states and trade networks flourished. The most powerful was the Kong Empire, founded around 1710 by Seku Watara (Sekou Ouattara), a Dyula warrior and merchant. With its capital in the city of Kong, in the northeast, it was a Muslim merchant empire, sustained by the Dyula trading houses that controlled the traffic in gold, kola nuts, salt and cloth, and that connected the southern forest with the great markets of Djenné and Timbuktu. Kong also became a renowned centre of Quranic learning, with mosques and schools that drew scholars from across the region.
In the southeast, the expansion of the Ashanti Empire in the late 17th century pushed many Akan peoples into the Ivorian forest. Those migrations gave rise to the Anyi kingdoms of Sanwi and Indénié (Ndényé), organised into powerful chiefdoms that kept close cultural and political ties with the Ashanti. The kingdom of Sanwi, with its capital at Krinjabo, would keep a strong sense of its own identity even during the colonial era.
The most famous migration is that of the Baoulé. According to tradition, after a succession dispute in Kumasi around 1750, Queen Abla Pokou led her people west, fleeing her Ashanti rivals. To cross the swollen Comoé River she is said to have sacrificed her own son, throwing him into the waters; on seeing the child's body she cried out "ba-ou-li" ("the child is dead"), and from that lament the name of the Baoulé is said to have been born — today the most numerous people in the country.
From the late 15th century, Portuguese caravels began sailing along this shoreline in search of riches, and they were soon joined by the Dutch, English and French. Unlike the neighbouring Gold Coast or Slave Coast, this stretch lacked sheltered natural harbours: a bar of breaking waves and an inland lagoon with no direct outlet to the sea made landing difficult and kept the big trading posts away.
Even so, Europeans found a coveted product here: the ivory of the elephants that abounded in its forests. The tusk trade was so characteristic that it gave the territory its name —Côte d'Ivoire, the Ivory Coast—, just as the neighbouring stretches were named after grain, gold or slaves. Intensive hunting would, over time, decimate the elephant populations that had given the country its name.
The slave trade also reached these shores, though with less intensity than in the great slaving hubs further east. It is a past worth naming without euphemisms: men, women and children captured in the interior were sold and shipped to the Americas. The lack of safe harbours, however, kept Ivory Coast relatively on the margins of the Atlantic trade for centuries, and the interior kept its autonomy much longer than other parts of the African coast.
The French presence was formalised in the mid-19th century. In 1843-1844, Admiral Bouët-Willaumez signed treaties with the kings of the Grand-Bassam and Assinie regions, which came under French protection, and the first forts and trading posts went up. The Scramble for Africa at the Berlin Conference sped up the advance: on 10 March 1893, Ivory Coast was proclaimed a French colony, and the explorer Louis-Gustave Binger became its first governor.
The conquest of the interior was long and violent. The most stubborn resistance was led by Samori Touré, founder of the Wassoulou Empire, who fought the French for almost two decades until he was captured in 1898; that same year Samori razed the city of Kong, putting an end to the old trading empire. Many peoples of the west and centre held out well into the 20th century, during the so-called "pacification" campaigns. The colonial capital moved from Grand-Bassam to Bingerville after the yellow fever epidemic of 1899, and in 1933 it moved for good to Abidjan.
To make the colony profitable, France imposed cash crops —cocoa, coffee, bananas— and a brutal system of forced labour (the travail forcé): Africans were made to work unpaid on European plantations, building roads and laying the railway towards Upper Volta. That system of coercion, together with the head tax, left a deep scar on the country's memory and would spark the first major Ivorian political organisation.
The man who would change the country's destiny was born around 1905 in Yamoussoukro, into a family of Baoulé chiefs: Félix Houphouët-Boigny, a doctor by training and a prosperous cocoa planter. Fed up with the forced labour that was ruining African farmers in competition with the settlers, on 3 September 1944 he founded the Syndicat Agricole Africain (SAA), which brought Black planters together to demand fair wages and an end to unfree labour.
From that union was born, on 9 April 1946, the Parti Démocratique de Côte d'Ivoire (PDCI), the country's first political party and part of the large pan-African Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA). Elected as a deputy to the French National Assembly, Houphouët-Boigny secured that same year, 1946, the abolition of forced labour across French West Africa through the law that bears his name, the loi Houphouët-Boigny of 11 April. The move made him a hero throughout the region.
In the following years he shifted from confrontation to cooperation with France, served as a minister in several French governments and bet on a negotiated independence without a clean break. Ivory Coast gained self-government in 1958 and proclaimed full independence on 7 August 1960, with Houphouët-Boigny as its first president. He would rule the country for thirty-three years, until his death in 1993, under a one-party system built around the PDCI.
The first two decades of independence brought astonishing prosperity. Built on cocoa and coffee —and on the political stability and openness to foreign capital that Houphouët-Boigny promoted—, the economy grew at a dizzying pace. This was the so-called "Ivorian miracle": by the late 1970s, the country was the world's leading cocoa producer and Africa's largest exporter of pineapples, coffee and palm oil, and Abidjan was filling up with skyscrapers and with migrants from all over the region.
That growth had a cost and a limit. The wealth depended on a handful of products whose international prices collapsed in the early 1980s, plunging the country into a debt crisis. On top of that, the spread of plantations drew millions of workers from Burkina Faso, Mali and other countries, whose presence would later fuel tensions over who was "truly" Ivorian.
In 1983, Houphouët-Boigny moved the official capital to his home village, Yamoussoukro, and turned it into a monumental capital of colossal avenues. His crowning work was the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace, built between 1985 and 1989 as a supersized version of St Peter's in the Vatican: the largest church in the world, raised in the middle of the savanna for more than 300 million dollars just as the economic miracle had already faded. When the "Old Man" died, in December 1993, he left a country prosperous in memory but fragile, and a contested succession.
Houphouët-Boigny's death opened a turbulent period. His successor, Henri Konan Bédié, promoted the concept of ivoirité ("Ivorian-ness") to exclude his political rivals, especially Alassane Ouattara, a northerner from a family with roots in neighbouring Burkina Faso. An electoral law required both parents of a presidential candidate to have been born in the country, which shut Ouattara out and inflamed the rift between a mainly Christian and animist south and a Muslim north. In 1999, a military coup overthrew Bédié; in 2000, Laurent Gbagbo came to power in elections that were also disputed.
On 19 September 2002, a military uprising split the country in two. The northern rebels, grouped in the Forces Nouvelles, took control of the northern half with their base in Bouaké, while Gbagbo's government held the south. The First Ivorian Civil War dragged on until the Ouagadougou agreement of 2007, with the country divided and watched over by French and UN forces. It is worth choosing words carefully: it was a conflict with thousands of dead, displaced people and serious abuses on both sides.
The wound reopened with the 2010 election. In the run-off of 28 November, the electoral commission declared Ouattara the winner, but Gbagbo refused to accept defeat. The standoff triggered the Second Civil War, five months of violence that left some 3,000 dead. In April 2011, with the support of French and UN forces, pro-Ouattara troops captured Gbagbo, who was sent to the International Criminal Court in The Hague —where years later, in 2019, he would be acquitted. Ouattara finally took office as president.
After a decade of crisis, the country embarked on a remarkable recovery. Under the presidency of Alassane Ouattara, the Ivorian economy began growing strongly again and became one of the most dynamic in Africa, with Abidjan regaining its role as a great metropolis and the de facto economic capital of francophone West Africa, even though Yamoussoukro remains the official political capital.
Cocoa is still the heart of the Ivorian economy and identity: the country produces around 40% of the world's cocoa and is, by a huge margin, the top exporter on the planet. That wealth has a flip side —forest loss, price volatility and labour on the plantations are persistent problems—, and the challenge of making sure the world's chocolate leaves more value in Ivorian hands is still open.
The scars of the war have not fully healed: national reconciliation, the land question and tensions around elections still shape politics. But today's Ivory Coast is also a young, creative and vibrant country, the birthplace of coupé-décalé and home to the football of the Elephants, African champions in 2015 and 2024. From the Kong Empire to the skyscrapers of the Plateau, from Queen Pokou to the basilica of Yamoussoukro, this is a country that carries a dense history and keeps reinventing itself.
The 5 histories, one after another. Use the buttons above to jump to the one you want.
The colonial history of Ivory Coast began on the coast, at Grand-Bassam. It was here, on this strip of land between the ocean and the lagoon, that France signed its first treaties in the 1840s and where, after the colony was proclaimed in 1893, the first capital was set up. Its administrative district, the "Quartier France", filled up with colonial buildings, trading houses and the governor's residence.
Its time as capital was short. A devastating yellow fever epidemic in 1899 decimated the European population and pushed the authorities to move the seat of power to Bingerville, further inland, and later to Abidjan. Grand-Bassam remained a port and seaside resort, and its colonial architecture was frozen in time.
That unique ensemble —a Franco-Ivorian colonial town with its street plan, its houses and its mix of styles— was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2012. Today Grand-Bassam is at once a museum town, Abidjan residents' favourite beach and a crafts centre, just forty kilometres from the big city.
Abidjan began as a modest village of the Ébrié (Tchaman) people on the shores of the lagoon. Its fate changed with the railway and, above all, when the French made it the capital of the colony in 1933. But the decisive leap came in 1950-1951 with the opening of the Vridi Canal, which finally gave the lagoon a direct outlet to the sea and made it possible to build a large deep-water port.
With the port, Abidjan took off. During the "Ivorian miracle" of the 1960s and 1970s it filled with skyscrapers, avenues and whole neighbourhoods —Treichville, Cocody, Plateau— and attracted migrants from all over the country and the region. Its business district, the Plateau, bristling with towers reflected in the Ébrié Lagoon, earned it the nickname "the Manhattan of the tropics".
Although the official capital has been Yamoussoukro since 1983, Abidjan is home to the de facto government, the ministries, the embassies, the port and almost all of the country's economic and cultural life. With around six million people in its metropolitan area, it is the largest city in francophone West Africa and a cultural capital that gave the world coupé-décalé.
Abidjan's geography is inseparable from its lagoon. The Ébrié Lagoon is a long arm of brackish water running parallel to the ocean, dotted with islands and peninsulas over which the city spreads, linked by bridges that are part of the urban landscape. Before the metropolis, these shores were the domain of the lagoon peoples.
The Ébrié or Tchaman, who gave the village its first name, and other lagoon Akan groups lived from fishing, farming and trading by dugout canoe along the network of lagoons that runs the whole length of the Ivorian coast, from Grand-Lahou to Assinie and the border with Ghana. Their villages still survive, some swallowed up by Abidjan's growth.
The lagoon is still the soul of the region: pinasses and ferries ply its waters, markets and maquis (popular eateries) serving fresh fish line its shores, and its environmental health —threatened by pollution from a huge city— is now a central concern for Abidjan's future.
In the middle of the metropolis a marvel survives: Banco National Park, more than 3,400 hectares of primary tropical rainforest surrounded by Abidjan's densely populated neighbourhoods. It is one of the last remnants of the rainforest that covered this whole region before the city devoured it.
Protected as a national park since 1953, Banco is a true green lung: it is home to giant trees, ferns, streams, monkeys and rich birdlife just a few kilometres from the skyscrapers of the Plateau. At its gates, on the river, one of the city's great hand-washing laundries also operates — the famous fanicos, a real social institution in Abidjan.
The park symbolises the tension that defines the region: the original forest against the unstoppable advance of concrete. Preserving this block of forest in the heart of one of Africa's largest cities is an environmental challenge and also a global rarity that makes Abidjan a unique case.
The Ivorian Atlantic coast is the door through which colonial history came in. Here, at Assinie and Grand-Bassam, the French admiral Bouët-Willaumez signed the first protectorate treaties with local kings in 1843-1844, and here the first forts and trading posts were built, from which France gradually pushed into the interior.
This coast, however, was always difficult. A violent bar of breaking waves and the absence of sheltered bays made landing hard for centuries and kept the region relatively on the margins of the great Atlantic trade. Real access to the sea only came in the 20th century with engineering works such as the Vridi Canal in Abidjan and, later, the port of San-Pédro.
Behind the line of beaches runs an almost continuous chain of lagoons, which for centuries was the coast's real highway: the dugout canoes of the Avikam, Alladian, Néyo and other peoples travelled along them. Beach, lagoon and ocean define the identity of this whole southern strip of the country.
In the south-west, San-Pédro is a young city built almost from nothing. Its large deep-water port opened in 1971, at the height of the "Ivorian miracle", to develop the forested south-west and give its produce an outlet to the sea. The plan worked beyond all expectations: today San-Pédro is the world's leading port for cocoa exports.
More than half of the Ivorian harvest passes over its quays, and since Côte d'Ivoire is the world's top producer, with around 40% of the planet's cocoa, a good share of the chocolate eaten around the world begins its journey here. The city grew with the port to more than 250,000 inhabitants and became the economic capital of the south-west.
San-Pédro is also the gateway to a region of contrasts: urban beaches close at hand, the country's wildest coastline to the west, and inland the great blocks of primary rainforest such as Taï National Park. This is the modern cocoa Côte d'Ivoire, with all the wealth and all the pressure on the forest that this brings.
Before Abidjan and San-Pédro rose to prominence, other ports had their moment of glory. Sassandra, at the mouth of the river of the same name and home mainly to the Neyo people, was for a time the country's leading port. Today it is a quiet coastal town with colonial remains, a good base for discovering some of the most unspoilt beaches on the coast, such as Poli and Drewin.
Further east, Grand-Lahou is the "town of three waters": here the great Bandama River meets the lagoon and the ocean. Home mainly to the Avikam people, it is known for its old colonial settlement of Lahou-Kpanda. The settlement was built on a fragile spit of sand at the river mouth and is now literally being swallowed by coastal erosion, a ghost town that the sea is slowly taking, old European houses and all.
Grand-Lahou is also the gateway to Azagny National Park, a world of mangroves, channels and wildlife. These small, sleepy ports hold the memory of a coast that was once a frontier and a customs post, until modern engineering shifted trade to the big terminals of Abidjan and San-Pédro.
In the far south-east, near the border with Ghana, Assinie is today the country's most fashionable beach resort. It sits on a narrow strip of sand between the Atlantic and the Aby Lagoon, with palm-lined beaches, resorts and villas where well-off Abidjan residents spend their weekends. But this coast has a much deeper history.
Assinie was one of the first points of contact between the French and Africans, and the whole region was part of the Anyi (Agni) kingdom of Sanwi, with its capital at Krinjabo. Born of Akan migrations from the Ashanti world in the 17th and 18th centuries, Sanwi kept a strong identity of its own. After independence it even attempted to secede, so distinct did it feel.
Behind the luxury villas, then, lies a past of Anyi kings, gold and lagoon trade. Assinie is also the gateway to the archipelago and the Ehotilé Islands National Park, a group of sacred islands in the Aby Lagoon that were places of worship for the coastal peoples. Modern leisure and Akan memory share the same strip of sand.
Central Côte d'Ivoire is the heartland of the Baoulé, the country's largest people and one of the branches of the great Akan family. Their origin is wrapped in one of the most famous founding legends of West Africa: the story of Queen Abla Pokou.
According to tradition, around 1750, after a succession dispute in Kumasi, capital of the Ashanti empire, Queen Pokou fled west with her followers, pursued by her rivals. When they reached the swollen Comoé River and could not cross, the soothsayers are said to have demanded the sacrifice of what she held most dear. The queen threw her own son into the water, and then, the story goes, hippos or trees formed a bridge that let them cross. Seeing the child dead, Pokou cried out "ba-ou-li", "the child is dead", and that lament gave the Baoulé their name.
Beyond the myth, the Baoulé settled in the centre of the country, blending their Akan heritage with local peoples, and developed a remarkable artistic tradition. Their masks, sculptures and gold weights are now prized in museums around the world. This people would also produce the man who founded the modern nation, Félix Houphouët-Boigny.
Yamoussoukro was the modest home village of Félix Houphouët-Boigny, a Baoulé chief and the country's first president. When "the Old Man" reached the peak of his power, he decided to turn his village into the nation's capital, and in 1983 he officially moved the political capital of Côte d'Ivoire there.
Houphouët-Boigny made it a monumental and somewhat surreal capital. It has very wide and often empty avenues, large government buildings, a foundation, elite schools and a famous lake of sacred crocodiles beside the presidential palace. Everything is on a scale meant for a great metropolis, in a city of barely more than 350,000 people in the middle of the savannah.
Reality won out over ambition. Yamoussoukro is the official capital, but Abidjan never stopped being the de facto economic, administrative and diplomatic centre. The capital "by law" and the capital "in practice" live side by side in a curious dual arrangement, a reminder of the enormous personal power the nation's founder came to hold.
The building that made Yamoussoukro famous worldwide is the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace. Houphouët-Boigny conceived it as both a legacy and an offering. It was built between 1985 and 1989 as a supersized version of St Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, with a colossal dome, colonnades and monumental stained-glass windows.
According to Guinness World Records, it is the largest Christian religious building in the world, larger and taller than St Peter's in Rome. It cost an estimated more than 300 million dollars, in a country with a non-Christian majority, and just as the "Ivorian miracle" had collapsed. That made it a source of both wonder and controversy. Pope John Paul II consecrated it in 1990.
Today the basilica rises from the savannah as one of the most unexpected sights in West Africa: a giant replica of the Vatican surrounded by palm groves, able to hold thousands of worshippers beneath its dome. It is the lasting symbol of the founding father's ambition and the capital's main tourist attraction.
North of Yamoussoukro, Bouaké is the second-largest city in Côte d'Ivoire, with close to a million inhabitants. It lies in the heart of Baoulé country, at the railway junction on the line linking Abidjan with Ouagadougou. It is the great trading crossroads between the coastal south and the savannah north, a city of markets, crafts and a famous carnival.
Its position as a hinge put it at the centre of the national tragedy. When the rebellion broke out on 19 September 2002, Bouaké became the headquarters of the Forces Nouvelles and the de facto capital of the rebel north. For almost a decade the city sat on the rebel side of a country split in two, with a "zone of confidence" patrolled by French and UN forces cutting across the territory.
When the conflict ended in 2011, Bouaké began a slow reconstruction and regained its role as the great centre of the interior. Its revival, with busy markets, a university and industry, is one of the symbols of a Côte d'Ivoire trying to put the war behind it, even if the wounds of that split are slow to heal completely.
Western Côte d'Ivoire breaks away from the image of savannah and coast. Here the land folds into green mountains, an extension of the ranges that rise towards Guinea and Liberia. It is the wettest and most rugged region of the country, with waterfalls, upland forest and villages perched on the slopes.
These mountains are home to the Dan, also called the Yacouba, one of the Kru forest peoples. The Dan are famous worldwide for their art. Their ritual masks, with smooth, expressive faces, are among the most admired works of African art and served social, judicial and spiritual roles. Their mask dances are still alive, including the astonishing acrobat who dances on stilts.
Another Dan marvel is the liana suspension bridge: walkways hung over rivers and woven from forest lianas, using a technique that tradition surrounds with secrecy and ritual. Mountains, masks and liana bridges make the west the most spectacular and culturally rich region of the country.
At the heart of the region lies Man, capital of the Tonkpi region and the "city of 18 mountains", named for the green peaks around it. About 570 kilometres from Abidjan and close to the borders with Guinea and Liberia, it is the main city of the west and the base for exploring its landscapes.
Above the city rises its emblem, the Dent de Man ("Man's Tooth"), a sharp rocky peak of about 881 metres whose pointed outline looks like a fang. Climbing it is one of the country's signature treks. Not far away stands Mount Tonkoui, the second-highest peak in Côte d'Ivoire, and waterfalls tumble through the forest everywhere, such as the well-known Man waterfall.
Man is also a centre of Dan culture. Around the city you can see mask dances and liana bridges, and its markets bring together produce from the mountains. A town of highlanders and border life, it shows the coolest, greenest and most vertical side of a country usually imagined as flat and tropical.
To the south-west, between the mountains and the Liberian border, lies the country's greatest natural treasure: Taï National Park. Its roughly 536,000 hectares form the largest block of primary tropical rainforest left anywhere in West Africa. UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site in 1982, and it is also a biosphere reserve.
Taï is an almost untouched sanctuary of biodiversity. Its dense forest is home to chimpanzees famous for using tools, stones and sticks to crack nuts, a behaviour scientists have studied for decades. It also shelters the rare and elusive pygmy hippo, many species of monkey and duiker, and plants and animals that in many cases exist nowhere else. It is a window onto what the region's forest looked like before the plantations.
That is exactly where the threat lies. The spread of cocoa and farming has consumed almost all of the original forest in southern and western Côte d'Ivoire, and Taï holds out like an island under pressure from poaching, logging and advancing crops. Protecting it is an environmental priority of the first order, not only for Côte d'Ivoire but for the whole planet.
The mountainous west is also a land of borders and tensions. Its humid climate made it the main frontier of cocoa expansion in recent decades. Waves of planters and workers arrived from other regions and neighbouring countries, which multiplied wealth but also competition for land and deforestation.
That mix of populations, together with the proximity of turbulent Liberia, made the west one of the most violent hotspots of the civil war. During the 2002-2011 conflict, rebel groups from the "great west" operated here, fighters and refugees crossed the Liberian border, and some of the bloodiest episodes took place, such as the Duékoué massacre in 2011.
Today the region is trying to heal those wounds and balance the cocoa boom with protecting its mountains and forest. Extraordinary natural beauty and the memory of conflict live side by side in the west, the greenest part of Côte d'Ivoire and, for years, also the hardest hit.
Northern Côte d'Ivoire is another world. The forest and the coast fall behind and the savannah opens up, with its baobabs, its dry heat and a culture more closely tied to the Sahel. Its main city is Korhogo, capital of the Poro region and the heart of the Senufo people, one of the richest cultures in the country.
The Senufo are farmers, but above all they are master craftspeople. Korhogo is famous for the painted cloths of the nearby village of Fakaha, the "toiles de Korhogo", decorated with animal and mask motifs using fermented mud. It is also known for its woodcarvers, its blacksmiths and the weavers of the Koko quarter. Senufo society was organised around the Poro, an initiation institution that shaped spiritual and social life.
Kaha hill (mont Korhogo) watches over the city and looks out across the savannah. Korhogo is the cultural capital of the north and the gateway to a world of villages, markets and traditions with an identity very different from the cosmopolitan coastal south.
Long before colonial rule, the Ivorian north was a crossroads of great trade routes. Here in the north-east rose the Kong Empire, founded around 1710 by Seku Watara, a leader of the Dyula (Juula), the Mande people of Muslim traders who dominated long-distance trade.
Kong thrived as a hub between the forest and the Sahel. Gold, kola nuts, salt, cloth and captives passed through its markets on routes that connected with Djenné, Timbuktu and the great trans-Saharan trade. The city also became a beacon of Islam, with Sudano-Sahelian mosques and Koranic schools that drew students from across the region. Its historic mosque still stands as a reminder of that splendour.
The end came abruptly. In 1898, during his wars against the French, Samori Touré attacked and destroyed Kong. That same year Samori was captured and France took control of the north. But the Dyula legacy of Islam, trade and links to the Sahel still shapes the identity of the whole region.
The north also holds the country's greatest wildlife treasure: Comoé National Park. At more than 1.1 million hectares, it is the largest protected area in all of West Africa. The Comoé River, which gives the park its name, runs through it. UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site in 1983, and it is also a biosphere reserve.
Its value lies in its variety. Comoé protects a vast mosaic of savannahs, gallery forests along the river and dry woodland. This transition between the Sahelian and forest worlds supports enormous biodiversity. It is a refuge for elephants, hippos, antelopes, buffalo, lions, savannah chimpanzees and a very rich birdlife, plus crocodiles in the river.
The park went through critical times. Poaching and lawlessness during the war years put it on the List of World Heritage in Danger, and it came off that list in 2017 after recovery efforts. Today Comoé is Côte d'Ivoire's main safari destination and a symbol of conservation in a country whose wildlife has been badly depleted.
The savannah north, Muslim and tied to the Sahel, played a central part in the country's political drama. From the 1990s, the southern ruling class used the concept of ivoirité to define who was "truly" Ivorian and to shut out rivals such as Alassane Ouattara. This region was its main target, along with people of northern origin and those with roots in neighbouring countries.
That policy of exclusion, added to the old inequalities between a prosperous cocoa-growing south and a poorer north, opened the great national divide. When the rebellion broke out in 2002, the north came under the control of the Forces Nouvelles, with Bouaké and Korhogo among its strongholds. For almost a decade the country was split in two by a line running across the central savannah.
With the victory of Ouattara, himself a northerner, and the end of the war in 2011, the region stopped being the "rebel" side and rejoined the rest of the country. Reconciling north and south and healing the wounds of ivoirité remain unfinished business for today's Côte d'Ivoire.
Hardly anything that happened to Ivory Coast happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
