Franceville, in the far southeast of Gabon, is the gateway to a country hardly anyone expects: one of grassy plateaus, red sand canyons and savannahs, a landscape that breaks completely with the dense forest covering the rest of the territory. The country's third-largest city and the end of the legendary Trans-Gabon Railway, it is a comfortable base for exploring the natural wonders of Haut-Ogooué.
Just outside the city, the Ogooué River plunges over the spectacular Poubara falls, crossed by one of the oldest and most famous liana bridges in Africa, woven by hand by the Batéké people. A little further on lie the red canyons of Léconi, the most photographed landscape in Gabon, and the Parc de la Lékédi, where you can see mandrills and gorillas. All with a highland climate that is somewhat cooler and more comfortable than on the coast.
This guide shows you what to see in and around Franceville, how to get there by plane or train, how to organise trips to Poubara, Léconi and the Lékédi, and where to sleep and eat. Steeped in political history —former president Omar Bongo came from here— and home to an important scientific centre, Franceville is much more than the end of the line: it is the beginning of Gabon's plateau country.
Franceville was born in 1880, when the Franco-Italian explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza founded a post on the upper Ogooué that he gave this name, and which served as a settlement for freed slaves, hence its name 'city of the free'. Teke territory, the region was a key mining area throughout the 20th century —the manganese of Moanda is one of the largest reserves in the world— and the birthplace of the man who ruled Gabon for more than four decades, Omar Bongo, who endowed it with infrastructure, a university and a prestigious medical research centre. The full story is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Gabon beyond the rainforest: the grassy Batéké plateaux, the Poubara falls with their liana bridge, and Franceville, the town Brazza founded at the end of the Trans-Gabon line.
Read the history of The southeast: plateaux and waterfalls →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before it was called Franceville, this corner of the upper Ogooué was known as Masuku, as it still is in the local language. It lies at the heart of the territory of the Batéké (or Téké) people. The Batéké are a Bantu people who live on the sandstone plateaus of south-eastern Gabon and the neighbouring regions of the Republic of the Congo. It is an unusual landscape of grassy savannahs, hills and canyons, quite unlike the rainforest that covers the rest of the country. They lived by growing cassava, hunting on the savannah and fishing in the Ogooué, and they had a rich material and spiritual culture.
The Batéké are famous for their art and traditions: flat masks painted in geometric colours (the well-known Téké-Kidumu masks), carved power figures and, above all, their skill at weaving plant fibres. You can see that skill in works like the legendary liana bridges over the Ogooué. Their society was organised around chiefdoms and lineages. Their history is tied to that of the great Téké kingdoms that controlled part of the Congo Basin before colonial times.
The upper Ogooué was a crossroads. People, goods and knowledge travelled along the river and the savannah routes between the interior of Central Africa and the Atlantic coast. When Europeans travelled up the Ogooué in the 19th century, they found well-organised Téké societies here, on the plateaus where Franceville would later be built. The Batéké heritage is still very present in the region: in the language, the crafts, the food and in living traditions such as the Poubara liana bridge.
The founding of Franceville is tied to one of the most unusual figures in African exploration. Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza was an aristocrat of Italian origin in the service of France, and he led several expeditions up the Ogooué from the 1870s onwards. In 1880, as he pushed inland and France competed with other colonial powers for the Congo Basin, Brazza founded a post on the upper Ogooué and named it Franceville. The name had two meanings: it honoured France and it suggested the idea of freedom.
That is because Franceville began, to a large extent, as a settlement for freed slaves. Brazza stood out for being somewhat less violent than other colonisers and for opposing slavery. He freed captives and settled them at the new post, which is where the idea of the 'city of the free' comes from. So, at the far south-eastern edge of what would become Gabon, a settlement appeared that was both a step in French colonial expansion and an anti-slavery gesture, right in the middle of the European scramble for Africa.
For the next few decades, Franceville was a small administrative and trading post in a remote region that became part of French Equatorial Africa. It lay more than 700 kilometres from the coast through forest and along the river. That distance kept it isolated and slow to grow for most of the colonial period. But its strategic position on the upper Ogooué, close to mineral resources that nobody was mining yet, held a future no one could have imagined at the time: it would become one of the country's main cities.
What changed the fate of south-eastern Gabon was geology. In the Moanda area, a few dozen kilometres from Franceville, lies one of the largest manganese deposits in the world, and manganese is essential for making steel. The company COMILOG began mining it in the late 1950s. That turned Haut-Ogooué into a strategic mining region and one of the engines of Gabon's economy, a role it still plays today: the country is one of the world's leading manganese producers.
Getting the ore out of such a remote inland region was a huge logistical challenge. For years, a cross-border cable car carried the manganese to the Congo, and the Congolese railway took it on to the sea. The lasting solution was the Transgabonais, the great national railway built between 1974 and 1986. It runs across the country from west to east, linking the port of Owendo, next to Libreville, with Franceville. The line was built largely to carry manganese and timber, and it made Franceville the country's eastern terminus, with a modern link to the coast.
The railway and mining drove the growth of Franceville and the whole of Haut-Ogooué. The population grew, the city gained new infrastructure and it became one of Gabon's main cities. Mineral resources, the railway and, later, hydroelectric power from dams on the Ogooué such as the one at Poubara laid the foundations for developing a region that had spent decades as a remote corner of forest and savannah.
You can't separate the modern history of Franceville from the story of Omar Bongo Ondimba, the man who ruled Gabon for more than four decades. He was born in 1935 in Lewai (now Bongoville), in Haut-Ogooué, near Franceville. Bongo became president in 1967 after the death of Léon Mba, the first president of independent Gabon. He held power until his own death in 2009, one of the longest rules in African history. His roots in the region shaped Franceville's future in a big way.
As president, Bongo poured money and projects into his home region. Franceville got infrastructure, government buildings and a university, the Université des Sciences et Techniques de Masuku (USTM). Above all, it got the prestigious Centre International de Recherches Médicales de Franceville (CIRMF), founded in 1979. The centre made the city a leading scientific hub in Central Africa, known for its studies of primates and of emerging diseases such as Ebola. Franceville owes much of its rise as a modern provincial capital to this period.
All that investment also reflected how power worked in Gabon at the time, where regional loyalties and money from oil and mining carried a lot of weight. With that boost, Franceville became the country's third-largest city, with facilities you rarely find in a town in the African interior. After Omar Bongo died, his son Ali Bongo led the country until 2023. That year a military coup ended more than half a century of rule by the Bongo family and opened a new chapter in the history of Gabon and its south-east.
Today Franceville is a lively provincial capital of more than a hundred thousand people. It is Gabon's third-largest city and the gateway to some of the country's most striking scenery. It is a mining and administrative centre and a university and science hub, thanks to the USTM and the CIRMF. It is also drawing more and more visitors, who come for the natural wonders of Haut-Ogooué: the Poubara falls and liana bridge, the red canyons of Léconi, the savannahs of the Batéké plateaus and wildlife reserves such as the Parc de la Lékédi.
The city is also the end of the line for the Transgabonais railway, which connects it to Lopé and the coast and puts it on the travel routes through the interior. Its altitude makes it a little cooler, and its relaxed atmosphere makes it a pleasant base for exploring a region that breaks every cliché about Gabon. Here the landscape isn't dense rainforest but savannah, plateau and red rock: a world of wide-open horizons that even many Gabonese from the coast know little about.
Franceville began as a colonial post founded by Brazza for freed slaves. It went on to become a mining town, a president's birthplace and the capital of the plateaus. Along the way it sums up much of Gabon's modern history: exploration, the fight against slavery, mineral wealth, political power and now a bet on science and ecotourism. For travellers, it is the perfect starting point for discovering the unexpected Gabon of the south-east, where the great Ogooué River begins among red canyons and liana bridges.
