Port-Gentil is Gabon's oil capital: the country's second city, set on an island in the Ogooué delta, surrounded by water and, curiously, with no road linking it to the rest of the country. You can only get there by plane or by boat. It is a city of business, oil platforms and sawmills rather than tourism, with a cosmopolitan port feel shaped by decades of the crude oil and timber industries.
For travellers, Port-Gentil is above all a strategic stopover and a gateway to nature. From here —and from nearby Cap Lopez— humpback whale watching is organised, as the whales gather off the coast to breed between July and September. It is also one of the starting points for the great Loango National Park, with its beach-going elephants and its gorillas. The city also has Atlantic beaches such as Cap Lopez and Sogara, good fish and the relaxed atmosphere of a coastal town.
This guide covers Port-Gentil from a practical angle: how to get there (only by air or sea), what to do in the city and on its beaches, when and how to see the whales of Cap Lopez, how to use it as a springboard to Loango and Omboué, and what to expect from an expensive oil city with access to spectacular nature. It's not a postcard destination, but it is a key piece on the map of Gabon's south coast.
The cape that shelters Port-Gentil was sighted by the Portuguese navigator Lopo Gonçalves around 1473-1474, and it took the name Cap Lopez from him. Mandji Island, in the Ogooué delta, was inhabited by the Orungu people, who traded with Europeans; in 1873 the French signed a treaty with them. In the late 19th century, trading houses exporting okoumé wood set up there, and the city —named Port-Gentil in honour of the French officer and explorer Émile Gentil— grew as a timber port. But its big leap came with oil, when the Elf company began offshore production and turned it into the country's economic capital. More on Gabon's history in the Libreville and Loango guides.
Read the full history ↓The coast where the rainforest meets the sea: elephants and buffalo walking along Atlantic beaches, humpback whales, the oil capital of Port-Gentil and the leatherback turtles of Mayumba.
Read the history of The southern coast and Loango →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The history of Port-Gentil begins at sea. Around 1473-1474, the Portuguese navigator Lopo Gonçalves, sailing for the Portuguese crown as it explored the coast of West Africa, reached a cape in this part of the Gulf of Guinea. In his honour, the headland came to be called Cap Lopez (Cape Lopez), the point that today shelters the city and gives it its name. This was the age of the great Portuguese explorations along the African coast, which gave European names to capes, rivers and bays one after another.
Mandji Island, at the mouth of the Ogooué River delta, where Port-Gentil stands, was home to the Orungu people, a group of the Myéné family related to the Mpongwe of Libreville. The Orungu were skilled coastal traders and went on to form a kingdom that controlled trade at the mouth of the Ogooué, exchanging ivory, timber, wax and, during the centuries of the slave trade, enslaved people with the Europeans.
The Ogooué delta, with its maze of channels, islands and mangroves, was a natural crossroads between the interior of Gabon, reached by travelling up the great river, and the Atlantic. That strategic position, at the gateway to the country's most important river, would shape the future city's destiny as a port and trading centre.
French colonial rule was formalised in 1873, when France signed a treaty with the Orungu and brought the region into its emerging empire in Central Africa. In the late 19th century several trading houses set up on Mandji Island and drove the logging and export of okoumé, the Gabonese tree ideal for making plywood, which would become the mainstay of the colonial economy.
The settlement grew as a timber port: logs floated down the Ogooué from the interior piled up here to be shipped to Europe. The city was named Port-Gentil after Émile Gentil, a French naval officer and explorer who played a prominent role in colonial expansion in Central Africa in the early 20th century.
For decades, that is essentially what Port-Gentil was: a port of timber, sawmills and trade, tied to the river and the Atlantic, in a humid and isolated region. Its island location, in the delta with no road link to the rest of the country, always forced it to depend on the sea and, later, on air travel. It keeps that trait to this day, and it sets the city apart from almost any other major city.
Port-Gentil's real leap forward came with oil. From the mid-20th century, and especially after Gabon's independence in 1960, the discovery and development of major offshore oil fields completely transformed the city. The French company Elf (later merged into TotalEnergies) and other oil companies made Port-Gentil their operating base, and the old timber town became the country's economic and oil capital.
The oil boom brought money, workers of many nationalities, industrial infrastructure and a cosmopolitan air. Port-Gentil gathered refineries, oil terminals, service companies and a large expatriate community, while oil became Gabon's main source of income. The city lived the typical contrast of oil economies: wealth and modernity alongside working-class neighbourhoods and inequality.
That economic weight also gave it political prominence. In 1990, at the height of the wave of demands for multiparty democracy in Africa, Port-Gentil saw serious riots and protests, linked to the death of an opposition figure and to social unrest. They marked a tense moment in the country's recent history and showed how strategically important the oil capital was.
Today Port-Gentil is still Gabon's second city and its economic capital, dominated by the oil and timber industries. With around 150,000 inhabitants on its delta island, it keeps its port-city, cosmopolitan character and its unusual isolation: you can only get there by air or by sea, with no practical road linking it to Libreville or the interior. It is more a working city than a tourist one, with city beaches, good fish and the bustle of an industrial Atlantic city.
With oil production in relative decline and Gabon's push to diversify its economy, including through ecotourism, Port-Gentil has also been taking on a role as a gateway to the nature of the southern coast. From here and from nearby Cape Lopez, trips are organised to watch the humpback whales that arrive every dry season, and the city is one of the starting points for Loango National Park, the country's great must-see natural attraction.
So the old capital of okoumé and oil increasingly looks to the sea and the forest not just as a source of resources but as an attraction. Whales off the cape that Lopo Gonçalves sighted more than five centuries ago, elephants on the beaches of Loango close by: Port-Gentil sums up the challenge facing Gabon today, looking to its exceptional nature for a future beyond crude oil.
