The first people to live in the territory we now call Gabon were hunter-gatherers related to today's Pygmy peoples, who lived scattered across the immense equatorial rainforest long before anyone else arrived. Groups such as the Babongo, the Baka and the Bakola knew the forest like no one else: they moved with the game, the honey and the fruit, and developed a deep, ritual relationship with the forest that still survives in their polyphonic music and their traditions. For thousands of years they were the sole masters of these lands.
From roughly the first millennium BCE, and in successive waves that went on for centuries, the great Bantu expansion reached Central Africa. The Bantu peoples came from the northwest, from the area of today's border between Nigeria and Cameroon, and brought with them agriculture, pottery and, above all, ironworking, which completely transformed life in the region. They gradually settled the clearings, riverbanks and coasts, little by little pushing the hunting peoples deeper into the forest or absorbing them.
Those migrations gave rise to Gabon's human mosaic, which today brings together several dozen ethnic groups. Among the Bantu peoples who settled the country are the Myènè of the coast —led by the Mpongwe of the estuary—, the Punu and other groups in the south, and the Nzebi, Kota and Teke of the interior and the east. Much later, well into the second millennium, the Fang would arrive from the north and complete the ethnic map of modern Gabon. That diversity, woven over millennia in the rainforest, is the foundation of today's nation.
When the Europeans appeared on the horizon, the estuary that gives the country its name was dominated by the Mpongwe, a Myènè people of skilled traders and seafarers who controlled the river mouth and acted as middlemen between the interior and the sea. Organised into clans led by chiefs, the Mpongwe knew how to use their strategic position on the coast to become the region's great traders, a role that would shape their whole relationship with the newcomers.
The first Europeans were the Portuguese. Around 1472-1474, as part of the explorations sponsored by the Portuguese crown, navigators such as Lopo Gonçalves and Rui de Sequeira reached this part of the Gulf of Guinea. The shape of the wide estuary of the Komo River, with its arms and its curve, reminded them of a gabão, the hooded cloak or coat worn by Portuguese sailors, and they called it "Rio de Gabão". From that sailor's name, applied first to the river, then to the coast and finally to the whole country, came the word "Gabon".
Later, between the 18th and 19th centuries, came the last great migration that completed the country's ethnic puzzle: that of the Fang, a Bantu people who moved down from the north, from the lands of present-day Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea, pushing south and occupying much of northern and central Gabon. Warriors and farmers, the Fang would in time become the country's largest ethnic group. Portuguese, Dutch, English and French ships followed one another off these coasts, drawn by a trade that would soon have a very dark side.
For more than three centuries, the Gabonese coast was part of the great Atlantic trading circuit. At first, European ships were mainly after ivory, ebony, wax, precious woods and dyes. The Mpongwe of the estuary and other coastal peoples such as the Orungu, further south around Cape Lopez, grew rich as middlemen between the producers of the interior and the merchants from the sea. Nothing reached the Europeans directly: everything passed through the hands of local chiefs, who took their cut.
Over time, that trade shifted more and more towards the slave trade. The Loango coast to the south, and the Gabon estuary itself, became embarkation points for people captured in the interior and sold to traffickers who shipped them to the plantations of the Americas. This is a chapter that must be named without euphemisms: men, women and children torn from their communities, chained and carried across the ocean in atrocious conditions. The coastal kingdoms and chiefdoms took part in this traffic as suppliers, in an economy of violence that bled the African interior dry.
In the early 19th century, as the European powers gradually abolished the slave trade, France and Britain began patrolling these waters to intercept slave ships. It was precisely in this context of suppressing the trade that France found the excuse —and the opportunity— to settle permanently on the Gabonese coast, sign treaties with the Mpongwe chiefs and take the first step towards colonisation.
The French presence became official in 1839, when naval officer Édouard Bouët-Willaumez signed treaties with the Mpongwe chief Antchouwé Kowe Rapontchombo —whom the French called "King Denis"— to set up trading posts on the estuary. Fort d'Aumale was built in 1843. And in 1849 the city that would become the capital was born: Libreville, the "free city", founded as a settlement for some fifty slaves freed from the Brazilian slave ship L'Elizia, intercepted by the French navy near Loango. Its name was a direct echo of Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, created by the British with the same idea.
The great push into the interior was led by an Italian-born explorer who became a French citizen: Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza. Between 1875 and 1885 he travelled up the Ogooué River, the great waterway that crosses the country, explored its tributaries and the lands to the east, and signed treaties with local peoples that opened the whole interior of Gabon and the Congo to France. In 1880, on the plateaus of the southeast, Brazza founded Franceville, a town that also took in freed slaves. Unlike other conquerors, Brazza cultivated the image of a peaceful, respectful explorer, even though his work served imperial expansion all the same.
The European carve-up of Africa, sealed at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, consolidated French rule over the region. Gabon came under colonial administration, and in the following decades the authorities imposed forced crops and forced labour, the exploitation of timber —the prized okoumé, ideal for plywood— and a concession system that handed huge territories over to private companies. The resistance of peoples such as the Fang was crushed by force. The Gabonese rainforest was now fully caught up in the colonial machine.
In 1910, France reorganised its possessions in the region into a large colonial federation: French Equatorial Africa (AEF), with its capital in Brazzaville. Gabon became one of its four colonies, alongside Middle Congo, Ubangi-Shari (today's Central African Republic) and Chad. For decades, the Gabonese economy revolved around okoumé timber and other resources, extracted with African labour in very harsh conditions and with little investment in the local population.
In the middle of this remote colony, in 1913, an Alsatian doctor, theologian and musician named Albert Schweitzer founded a hospital on the banks of the Ogooué River, in Lambaréné, to treat the African population. Funded largely by his own organ concerts and by donations, the Lambaréné hospital became over the years a worldwide symbol of missionary and humanitarian medicine in the tropics. He was admired and also questioned —he was criticised for a certain colonial paternalism—, but his work earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952. The hospital is still running, and part of the complex is now a museum.
Both world wars also shook Gabon. In 1940, during the Second World War, Libreville saw fighting between the forces of Vichy France and those of General de Gaulle's Free France, which ended up taking the colony for the Allied cause. After the war, the winds of decolonisation began to blow: Africans gained political representation, the first Gabonese parties and leaders emerged, and the old AEF federation set its territories, one by one, on the road to independence.
Gabon became independent on 17 August 1960, as part of the wider emancipation of France's African colonies. Its first president was Léon Mba, a Fang politician from the estuary region who had been mayor of Libreville and who governed in close ties with the former colonial power. In February 1964, a military coup tried to overthrow him and briefly brought his rival Jean-Hilaire Aubame to power, but direct intervention by French troops put Mba back in office within days, an episode that showed just how much France was still overseeing its former colony.
Ill with cancer, Léon Mba prepared his succession by appointing a young civil servant, Albert-Bernard Bongo, as vice-president. When Mba died in Paris in November 1967, Bongo immediately succeeded him as president. In 1968 he founded a single party, the Gabonese Democratic Party (PDG), turning the country into a one-party state that he would control for decades. In 1973 he converted to Islam and took the name El Hadj Omar Bongo, to which he later added Ondimba.
Omar Bongo ruled Gabon for 42 years, until his death in 2009: one of the longest tenures in African history. His power rested on oil revenue —oil was discovered and exploited on a large scale from the 1970s—, on a skilful patronage network and on a close alliance with France within the so-called "Françafrique". With a small population and large oil revenues, the country reached one of the highest GDPs per capita on the continent, but that wealth was shared very unequally and much of the population remained poor. Under international pressure, Bongo accepted a formal return to multiparty politics in the early 1990s, though he kept winning every election until the end.
When Omar Bongo died in 2009, he was succeeded by his son Ali Bongo Ondimba, who won a disputed election and so extended the family's hold on power. His re-election in 2016, decided by a razor-thin margin amid allegations of fraud, sparked riots and the burning of Parliament. Ali Bongo also suffered a serious stroke in 2018 that raised doubts about his ability to govern, and in 2019 there was even a failed coup attempt. Discontent with more than half a century of rule by a single family was growing.
The end came on 30 August 2023. A few hours after the electoral authority declared yet another victory for Ali Bongo in a hotly contested vote, a group of senior military officers announced on television that they were taking power and placing the president under house arrest. The coup was led by General Brice Clotaire Oligui Nguema, head of the powerful Republican Guard and, ironically, a relative of the Bongos themselves. The coup ended 56 years of uninterrupted rule by the Bongo dynasty and was greeted with celebrations in the streets of Libreville. Oligui Nguema took office as transitional president and, in April 2025, was elected president at the ballot box.
Beyond politics, Gabon today faces the challenge of reinventing its economy. Oil, for decades its great source of wealth, is in decline, and the country is trying to diversify into processed timber, manganese mining —it is one of the world's largest producers— and, above all, ecotourism. In 2002, President Omar Bongo had surprised the world by creating thirteen national parks in one go, protecting around 11% of the territory: a pioneering bet on conserving one of Africa's best-preserved rainforests, home to gorillas, forest elephants, mandrills and extraordinary wildlife. With two UNESCO World Heritage Sites —the Ecosystem and Relict Cultural Landscape of Lopé-Okanda and Ivindo National Park—, Gabon now presents itself to the world as a green sanctuary, a country looking for its future both underground and beneath the canopy of its rainforest.
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The estuary of the Komo River, the great bay on which Libreville stands, is where Gabon's modern history begins. This was home to the Mpongwe, a Myènè people of traders who controlled the traffic between the interior and the sea. And it was the outline of this estuary —wide, curved, shaped like a sailor's cloak— that led 15th-century Portuguese navigators to call it "Rio de Gabão", the name that would eventually be given to the whole country.
In the 19th century, the Mpongwe chiefs signed the treaties with France that allowed the first trading and military posts to be set up in the area. "King Denis" (Antchouwé Kowe Rapontchombo) and other leaders negotiated with the newcomers, in a relationship that mixed trade, alliances and a gradual loss of sovereignty. The estuary thus became the gateway for the French colonisation of the whole region.
Libreville was born in 1849 with a symbolic purpose: to be a haven of freedom. The French founded it as a settlement for some fifty slaves freed from the Brazilian slave ship L'Elizia, captured by the French navy. Hence its name, "free city", inspired by Freetown in Sierra Leone. It joined the neighbouring Fort d'Aumale, built in 1843, and together they formed the core of the future capital.
Over time, Libreville grew from a small colonial post into the capital of independent Gabon in 1960 and a major Atlantic city. Today it is home to a huge share of the country's population and its institutional and economic life. Visitors will find its seafront promenade, the bustling Mont-Bouët market —the largest in the country—, the delicate wooden Saint-Michel church with its carved columns, and the National Museum of Arts and Traditions, which holds the famous masks and reliquary figures of Gabonese art. It is the logistical base from which almost every trip into the interior begins.
Around the estuary, nature is surprisingly close to the city. A boat ride across from Libreville, the sandy peninsula of Pointe-Denis offers long, almost empty Atlantic beaches, a few lodges and that end-of-the-world feeling just twenty minutes from the capital. It is the favourite beach escape for Libreville's residents.
Nearby, two national parks protect the estuary's coastal ecosystems. Pongara National Park, across from the city, combines dense mangroves, forest and beaches where, between November and March, leatherback turtles —the largest in the world— come ashore to nest; night outings are organised to watch them lay their eggs. To the north, Akanda National Park is a maze of mangroves, estuaries and sandbanks that serves as a key refuge for migratory birds and sea turtles, explored by boat through channels and flooded forest. Both are part of the network of thirteen national parks created in 2002.
Inland, northeast of the estuary, rise the Crystal Mountains, a range of low mountains covered in rainforest that is permanently wrapped in mist. It is one of the greatest hotspots of plant biodiversity in all of Africa: its damp slopes are home to an astonishing wealth of orchids, begonias, ferns and endemic plants, as well as waterfalls and superb birdlife.
Protected as Monts de Cristal National Park since 2002, it is a destination for lovers of plants, birds and hiking deep in the montane rainforest. Being relatively close to Libreville makes it one of the most accessible ways to dive into the lushness of the Gabonese rainforest without heading to the country's most remote regions.
Lopé National Park, in the centre of the country, is the easiest of Gabon's parks to reach, since you can get there on the Trans-Gabon train. It's also one of the most fascinating. It protects a unique mix of landscapes where the last savannahs, which survived the ice ages, meet the equatorial rainforest spreading over them. In this open landscape it's fairly easy to see large groups of mandrills, as well as forest elephants, buffalo and many birds. Lopé has some of the largest concentrations of mandrills in the world.
But Lopé matters for more than its nature. In 2007 UNESCO added it to the World Heritage List as the "Ecosystem and Relict Cultural Landscape of Lopé-Okanda". The listing also recognises its huge archaeological wealth: thousands of petroglyphs (rock engravings) and other remains show that people have lived in the region for thousands of years. They range from Stone Age hunters to the Bantu migrations that passed through these savannah corridors. Lopé is both a wildlife sanctuary and a record of human history in Central Africa.
If Lopé is the most accessible park, Ivindo National Park is Gabon at its wildest and most spectacular. It was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2021. It protects a stretch of the Ivindo River broken by majestic waterfalls such as Kongou and Mingouli, among the most impressive in Central Africa. They plunge through the country's densest and most untouched rainforest.
Its hidden gems are the baïs, swampy clearings in the middle of the forest where animals gather to feed on minerals and water plants. The most famous is Langoué Baï, "discovered" by science during naturalist Michael Fay's celebrated Megatransect in 2000. From a viewing platform, visitors can watch forest elephants, western lowland gorillas, sitatungas and buffalo come out into the open. It's one of the most extraordinary wildlife experiences on the continent, and very hard to match.
The central region is also home to the country's great railway, the Trans-Gabon. It's an ambitious line, built between 1974 and 1986 with oil revenue, that links Libreville on the coast with Franceville in the southeast, crossing hundreds of kilometres of rainforest. It was one of the major projects of the Omar Bongo era. The aim was to exploit timber and manganese from the interior and to connect a territory dominated by forest.
For travellers today, the train is the most practical way into the heart of Gabon. At Lopé station you can step off right at the park's gates, something very unusual in Central Africa. The Trans-Gabon stands for a small, resource-rich country's effort to connect its two worlds, the coast and the deep rainforest. It also puts the forest interior within reach of anyone who wants to explore it.
The Ogooué River is the backbone of Gabon. It rises in the southeast and crosses the country from east to west for about twelve hundred kilometres, then flows into the Atlantic through a wide delta near Port-Gentil. For centuries it was the main route for communication and trade, and the way into a land covered by impenetrable forest. Ivory and timber travelled along it, and so did enslaved people.
The explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza travelled up the Ogooué between 1875 and 1885, opening Gabon's interior to France. The river is still a lifeline today. Fishing villages line its banks, and its middle course, around Lambaréné, opens out into a remarkable system of lakes and channels. Travelling it by dugout canoe is one of the most authentic experiences in the country.
On the banks of the Ogooué, the quiet town of Lambaréné is famous around the world because of one man: Albert Schweitzer. He was an Alsatian doctor, theologian, philosopher and organist. Schweitzer arrived here in 1913 and founded a hospital to care for the African population. For decades he kept it going largely with money from his own organ concerts and from donations. His philosophy of "reverence for life" and his dedication earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952.
Schweitzer's hospital has been expanded and modernised, and it still works as a health and research centre. Part of the original complex is now a museum that keeps his consulting room, his home and many of his personal belongings. His legacy has since been reassessed critically because of his paternalism. Even so, Lambaréné keeps alive the memory of one of the most unusual figures in the country's history. The town is also the starting point for peaceful dugout canoe trips on the river.
Around Lambaréné, the Ogooué spills out into a fascinating maze of lakes, channels and flooded forest of great ecological value. It's a world of water and forest, dotted with fishing villages that live to the rhythm of the river and get around by dugout canoe. For their biodiversity, these lower Ogooué wetlands rank among the most important in Central Africa.
Travelling through the channels, you can see a wide range of birds. With luck, you may also spot hippos and African manatees, which are shy, endangered water mammals. It's a place for anyone looking for calm and close contact with nature and the riverside communities, in one of Gabon's most peaceful and authentic river landscapes.
Franceville lies in the far southeast of the country, in the Haut-Ogooué region. It's Gabon's fourth-largest city and the end of the Trans-Gabon Railway line. The explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza founded it in 1880 and, as with Libreville, partly meant it as a settlement for freed slaves. Its original name was Masuku. Set on the plateaux of the deep interior, it became an outpost for France's push towards the Congo.
Haut-Ogooué also carries special political weight as the home region of the Bongo clan, which ruled Gabon for 56 years. Omar Bongo was born near here, and during his long rule the area received special attention and investment. Today Franceville is the gateway to a corner of the country unlike the rest: the plateaux, waterfalls and savannahs of the southeast.
Batéké Plateau National Park shows the side of Gabon you least expect. Instead of the dense equatorial rainforest that covers most of the country, here you find grassy plateaux, savannah hills and sandstone canyons carved by rivers. It's an open, bright landscape that seems to belong to another continent. The park continues the great Batéké plateaux that stretch into the neighbouring Republic of the Congo, the ancestral land of the Teke, or Batéké, people.
The park was created in 2002 and is home to one of the country's most ambitious conservation projects: bringing back the lion, which had died out in Gabon. It also protects gorillas, forest elephants and unusual savannah wildlife. Because it's remote and its landscape is so unusual, it's a destination for adventurous travellers who want to see a Gabon completely unlike the closed rainforest.
Near Franceville, the Ogooué River, still young and wild at this point, plunges over the spectacular Poubara falls. They are among the most impressive waterfalls in the region and also supply hydroelectric power to the country's southeast. What made the place famous, though, isn't just the power of the water but a piece of traditional engineering that crosses it.
One of the oldest liana bridges in Africa stretches across the river. This hanging walkway is woven entirely from thousands of lianas by the Batéké people, who have rewoven and renewed it generation after generation since ancient times. It's living proof of the skill of local communities and a symbol of the bond between the region's peoples and their forest. Crossing it, hanging above the water, is one of the most memorable experiences in Gabon's southeast.
Loango National Park is Gabon's great unmissable natural sight and the source of images that have gone around the world: forest elephants, buffalo and hippos walking along deserted Atlantic beaches, with the rainforest on one side and the ocean on the other. Created in 2002 as part of the national park network, it protects a mosaic of forest, savannah, lagoons, mangroves and coastline that supports exceptional wildlife, including lowland gorillas and a great variety of birds.
Off its coast, between July and September, humpback whales and dolphins pass by, making Loango one of the few places on the planet where you can go on a land safari and watch whales almost at the same time. Tours combine 4x4 drives, boat trips on the lagoons and guided walks. It was this coast that led naturalist Michael Fay and others to push for the creation of the park system that defines the country's ecotourism image today.
Port-Gentil stands on an island in the Ogooué River delta. It is Gabon's second city and its economic capital, and the centre of the country's oil and timber industries. The refineries, the ports and the companies that for decades handled the nation's main source of wealth are all based here. The city has a strong character of its own, shaped by its industry and by being fairly isolated. Until recently no road linked it to the rest of the country, and most people arrived by plane or by boat.
For travellers, Port-Gentil is above all a useful stopover. Flights and boats leave from here for Loango National Park, and it's a base for watching humpback whales, which travel up these waters of the Gulf of Guinea between July and September. The city sums up the two sides of the country: oil Gabon and nature Gabon, with just a strip of sea between them.
In the far south of the country, almost on the border with the Republic of the Congo, Mayumba National Park protects a very long, narrow strip of sandy Atlantic beaches. It is one of the largest leatherback turtle nesting sites on the planet. Every season, between November and March, thousands of these giant turtles come out of the sea to lay their eggs in the sand. Leatherbacks are the largest turtles in the world, and this natural spectacle has made Mayumba a world reference point for protecting the species.
Most of the park is marine, and it also protects waters used by humpback whales and dolphins. Mayumba is remote and gets few visitors. It's an experience for anyone looking for nature at its purest and wildest, far from the crowds, on one of the best-preserved coastlines in Africa.
Hardly anything that happened to Gabon happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
