The south and centre of present-day Ghana are the historic home of the Akan peoples. They were farmers and goldsmiths who speak related languages (Twi, Fante, Akuapem), and over the centuries they built some of the richest states in West Africa. Their power rested on gold: the rivers and deposits of the forest region produced so much of the metal that, centuries later, it gave its name to the whole coast.
One of the first great Akan states was Bono (or Bono Manso), which emerged around the 14th century as a gold trading hub with links to the northern trade routes. Further south, along the routes to the sea, rival kingdoms rose one after another, competing to control the trade in the metal and, later, in weapons and captives. Denkyira became the dominant power of the interior. Akwamu ruled a vast stretch of coast in the late 17th century, and there were also Akyem and the Fante states on the shore. Gold was weighed with delicate brass weights shaped like animals and proverbs. These are true works of art, and today they are displayed in museums around the world.
This cluster of Akan kingdoms was constantly in tension and shifting alliances. Their chiefs ruled from "stools", symbols of the soul of each lineage, and they organised armies, courts and complex tribute systems. Out of this rivalry between gold states came, in the early 18th century, the most formidable of them all: the Ashanti confederation, which would prevail over its neighbours and shape the fate of the region for the next two centuries.
Northern Ghana tells a different story, one tied not to the Atlantic but to the desert. Long before the Europeans arrived, the northern savannahs were linked into the great trans-Saharan trade that connected sub-Saharan Africa with the Maghreb and the Mediterranean. Gold, kola nuts, shea butter and also captives travelled north along these routes. Salt, cloth, horses and, above all, Islam came back the other way.
One famous misunderstanding is worth clearing up: the ancient Ghana Empire (Wagadu), which gave the modern country its name, was not here at all but much further to the north-west, in what is now Mali and Mauritania. Nkrumah chose the name in 1957 as a tribute to the greatness of medieval Africa. What did happen in northern Ghana, between the 15th and 17th centuries, was the rise of powerful kingdoms. There was Dagbon, of the Dagomba people, and neighbouring Mamprugu, both linked to the legendary ancestor Naa Gbewaa. There was also Gonja, founded by Mande-speaking conquerors who came from the orbit of the Mali Empire. These kingdoms acted as a bridge between the Islamic world of the Sahel and the forest kingdoms to the south.
Market towns such as Salaga grew into huge caravan centres where Wangara and Hausa traders, Muslim scholars, northern cloth and slaves all crossed paths. One 19th-century European traveller was so struck by its size and cosmopolitan feel that he compared it to Timbuktu itself. Mande merchants and clerics brought Islam and Arabic writing, and that Saharan heritage has left gems such as the Larabanga mosque, built of mud and wood in the Sudanese style. Northern Ghana is the continental, Muslim face of a country that people tend to see only from the sea.
In 1471 Portuguese navigators reached this shore and were dazzled by the amount of gold the Akan peoples had to offer. They called the place A Mina, "the mine", and the whole region the Gold Coast (Costa da Mina). In 1482 an expedition led by Diogo de Azambuja built the castle of São Jorge da Mina at Elmina. It was the first permanent European fortress in sub-Saharan Africa, and it is the oldest European building still standing south of the Sahara. Its original purpose was to protect and control the gold trade.
Over time that trade turned into something far darker. As the plantations of the Americas demanded slave labour, the Gold Coast became one of the great hubs of the transatlantic slave trade. The coast filled up with forts and castles, several dozen of them, built by the Portuguese, Dutch, Danes, Swedes, Brandenburgers and British, who competed for these strongholds and seized them from one another. The Dutch took Elmina from the Portuguese in 1637, and the British made Cape Coast their headquarters.
Behind those bright white walls lay the dungeons. Men, women and children captured in the interior were crammed into them in appalling conditions before being shipped to the Americas. The "door of no return" at Cape Coast and Elmina was the threshold they passed through in chains towards the slave ships, never to come back. Today it is one of the most moving places of remembrance in Africa and a World Heritage Site. This past has to be named plainly: millions of Africans passed through these shores on their way into slavery, and these castles, both beautiful and terrible, are their testimony in stone.
While the Europeans fought over the coast, one of the most powerful states of precolonial Africa was being born deep in the forest. Towards the end of the 17th century, a handful of small Akan states that had been subjugated and exploited by the kingdom of Denkyira joined forces under the leadership of Osei Tutu. In 1701, at the decisive battle of Feyiase, they defeated Denkyira, which marked the birth of the Ashanti (Asante) Empire, with its capital at Kumasi.
The symbol of that union, and what held it together, was the Sika Dwa Kofi, the Golden Stool. According to tradition, the priest and adviser Okomfo Anokye called it down from the sky amid thunder and set it on Osei Tutu's knees. He declared that the very soul of the Ashanti nation lived in this stool of solid gold. No one, not even the king (the Asantehene), could sit on it, and it must never touch the ground. Around this stool, Anokye helped give the empire a constitution, a standing army and a remarkably elaborate system of government.
Throughout the 18th century and much of the 19th, the Ashanti extended their rule over much of present-day Ghana and beyond, controlling the trade in gold and kola nuts. Kumasi became an opulent capital with roads, palaces and a court full of ceremony. Gold was on show everywhere: in weights, jewellery and ornaments, and in the kente cloth reserved for royalty. The empire's wealth and organisation impressed the Europeans themselves, who soon came to see this forest power as their great rival for control of the Gold Coast.
A clash between the Ashanti Empire and the British Empire was inevitable. It played out in a long series of Anglo-Ashanti wars, with truces in between, from 1823 to 1900. The British, often allied with the Fante of the coast (historic enemies of the Ashanti), wanted to break the power of Kumasi and take control of trade. For decades the Ashanti held out with remarkable military skill.
The turning point came in 1874, when a British expedition marched on Kumasi, occupied it and burned it. That same year London formally declared the Gold Coast colony over the coastal strip. But the Ashanti Empire was not yet fully defeated. In 1896 the British occupied Kumasi again and exiled the Asantehene Prempeh I to the Seychelles in an attempt to leave the kingdom without a leader.
The most heroic episode came in 1900. The British governor, Frederick Hodgson, had the nerve to demand that the Golden Stool be handed over so he could sit on it. He did not understand that he was desecrating the soul of an entire people. When the chiefs hesitated, it was a woman, the queen mother Yaa Asantewaa, who took up arms and led the last great uprising, known as the War of the Golden Stool. Thousands of Ashanti besieged the British in the Kumasi fort in a fierce war that left thousands dead on both sides. The British finally crushed the revolt and exiled Yaa Asantewaa to the Seychelles too, where she died. In 1902 they annexed Ashanti as a Crown colony. But they never got the Golden Stool, which the Ashanti managed to hide, and the warrior queen remains a lasting symbol of African dignity and resistance.
With the annexation of Ashanti in 1902 and the addition of the Northern Territories, the British completed the Gold Coast colony. To the coastal strip they added the forest interior and the northern savannahs; the colonial capital had already moved from Cape Coast to Accra in 1877. After the First World War, part of the former German Togo was added as well. Known as British Togoland, it was administered under a mandate.
The colonial economy changed profoundly. Alongside the old trades in gold and timber came a crop that would change the country forever: cocoa. It was introduced in the late 19th century, and tradition credits Tetteh Quarshie with bringing the first seeds from Fernando Po. Small African farmers spread it until the Gold Coast became the world's largest producer. That wealth paid for roads, railways, the port of Takoradi and a network of schools and missions that produced an educated African elite.
Modern nationalism grew out of that educated elite and out of the African veterans who had fought for the empire in both world wars. The colony had a lively press, along with lawyers, doctors and teachers who first called for more representation and then for outright independence. The spark came in 1948, when police opened fire on a peaceful march of ex-servicemen in Accra and killed several of them. The riots that followed radicalised the movement and put Ghana irreversibly on the road to freedom.
The man who embodied that moment was Kwame Nkrumah. Educated in the United States and Britain and steeped in Pan-Africanist and socialist ideas, he returned home in 1947. He soon broke with the moderate nationalists and in 1949 founded his own party, the Convention People's Party (CPP), with a fiery slogan: "self-government now". His method of "positive action", meaning strikes and non-violent civil disobedience, landed him in prison but also made him overwhelmingly popular. While he was still behind bars, his party swept the 1951 elections, and the British had no choice but to release him and make him head of government.
At midnight on 6 March 1957, before an ecstatic crowd in Accra, Nkrumah declared independence with words that echoed across the continent: "At long last, the battle has ended!" The former Gold Coast was reborn as Ghana, named after the great medieval empire of West Africa. It was a historic event: Ghana became the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to free itself from European colonial rule. Its flag, with its black star as a symbol of African freedom, became the emblem of an entire era. In 1960 the country became a republic, with Nkrumah as president.
Nkrumah dreamed big. He pushed for rapid industrialisation, built schools and hospitals and the enormous Akosombo Dam on the Volta River, and above all he pursued a continental project: African unity. He was one of the chief architects of Pan-Africanism and of the Organisation of African Unity, founded in 1963. "The independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent," he declared. But his government slid into a one-party regime that was personalist, increasingly authoritarian and deep in debt, and it steadily lost support at home.
Nkrumah's dream came to an abrupt end on 24 February 1966, when a military and police coup overthrew him while he was abroad. He never returned and died in exile in 1972. This opened one of the most turbulent periods for the young nation. Between 1966 and 1981 Ghana went through a string of coups and was one of the most coup-prone countries in postcolonial Africa. Short-lived military and civilian governments took turns while the economy was in free fall.
Out of that chaos came a decisive and controversial figure: Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings. He first took power in an uprising in June 1979, during which several former heads of state were executed. He handed the government over to civilians, but as the country stalled he seized power again in another coup on 31 December 1981. Rawlings ruled with an iron hand for more than a decade and pushed through painful economic reforms. In the end he led the transition to democracy, with a new constitution in 1992 and multi-party elections that he won himself in 1992 and 1996, this time as a civilian president.
The big leap came in 2000, when John Kufuor of the opposition won the elections and Rawlings handed over power peacefully. It was the first democratic transfer of power from one party to another in the country's history, and one of the first in West Africa. Since then Ghana has become one of the most stable and respected democracies on the continent, with peaceful handovers between its two main parties: Kufuor, Atta Mills, Mahama, Akufo-Addo and Mahama again. Today the country relies on cocoa, gold and the oil found off its coast in 2007. Its vibrant culture exports highlife, afrobeats and kente to the world, and the "Year of Return" initiative invites the African diaspora to come back. Ghana honours its place as a pioneer of African freedom, though it still struggles with corruption, debt and the inequalities inherited from its history.
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Kumasi is the historical and spiritual heart of the Ashanti people and one of Ghana's most important cities. It was founded in the early 18th century as the capital of the Ashanti Empire under Osei Tutu and his adviser Okomfo Anokye. It became the centre of one of the most powerful and best-organised states in precolonial Africa, made wealthy by the trade in gold and kola nuts.
The British occupied and burned Kumasi in 1874 and again in 1896, deporting King Prempeh I. In 1900 the city was the scene of the last Ashanti uprising, the War of the Golden Stool, led by Yaa Asantewaa. Despite all this, the Ashanti monarchy survived: in 1935 the British restored the confederacy, and to this day the Asantehene, the king of the Ashanti, remains a figure of enormous prestige and moral authority in Ghana. His seat is the Manhyia Palace in Kumasi, which is also a museum today.
Kumasi is known as the "garden city" and the cultural capital of Ghana. It is home to the huge Kejetia market, one of the largest in West Africa, a maze of thousands of stalls selling just about everything. The city keeps alive the Ashanti traditions of gold and goldsmithing, talking drums, adinkra symbols and royal court art, and it still beats to the rhythm of a kingdom that never entirely ceased to exist.
You can't understand the Ashanti Region without the Sika Dwa Kofi, the Golden Stool. According to tradition, around 1701 the priest Okomfo Anokye brought it down from the sky to rest on the knees of Osei Tutu. He declared that the sunsum, the collective soul of the Ashanti people, lived in that solid gold stool. The stool is not a seat: no one sits on it, it never touches the ground, and it is treated as the most sacred being in the nation.
That sacred status explains the uprising of 1900. When the British governor Hodgson demanded to sit on the Golden Stool, it was more than a political blunder. It was a sacrilege, and it sparked the War of the Golden Stool. The Ashanti chose war over humiliation, and although they were defeated militarily, they managed to hide the real stool, which the British never found. In 1920, when some workers came across a golden stool by chance and stripped it of its ornaments, there was a huge scandal; it later turned out not to be the real one.
All Ashanti ceremony revolves around the Golden Stool: the enthronement of the Asantehene, festivals such as Akwasidae, gold regalia, state swords and kente cloth. It is one of the few cases in the world where a sacred precolonial object remains the living symbol of a people's identity, jealously guarded in the heart of Kumasi.
A few kilometres from Kumasi, the village of Bonwire is considered the birthplace of kente, Ghana's most famous cloth and one of Africa's great symbols around the world. Kente is woven in narrow strips of silk and cotton, in bright colours and geometric patterns, and the strips are sewn together to make full wraps. It began as a luxury cloth reserved for royalty and major Ashanti ceremonies.
Tradition says that two weavers from Bonwire learned the craft by watching a spider spin its web, and that this gave rise to the strip-loom technique. Every kente design has a name and a meaning, evoking proverbs, values, historical events or people. Each colour combination also carries a message: gold speaks of royalty and wealth, green of growth, and black of spiritual strength and mourning.
Today Bonwire's artisans still work on traditional wooden looms, patiently weaving strip after strip. Kente has gone beyond the Ashanti to become an emblem of pan-African identity and pride. It is worn at graduations and ceremonies across the African diaspora worldwide, and its colours appear on everything from academic stoles to fashion runways. Visiting Bonwire is a chance to see the living source of that art.
Southeast of Kumasi lies a geological and spiritual wonder: Lake Bosumtwi, Ghana's only natural lake. It formed a little over a million years ago when a meteorite struck and opened a huge crater. Today the crater holds deep water and is ringed by forested hills and villages.
For the Ashanti, Bosumtwi is sacred. Tradition holds that its waters are where the souls of the dead say farewell before leaving for the afterlife, and many rites and taboos survive around the lake. For a long time, out of respect for the lake's spirit, fishing from wooden boats was forbidden, so fishermen got around on simple planks, paddling with their hands.
Today Lake Bosumtwi combines that spiritual aura with natural appeal: its warm, calm waters are perfect for swimming and relaxing, and the villages on its shores offer a window onto rural Ashanti life. Scientists, for their part, study it as one of the best-preserved craters in the world, an archive of the planet's climate and history written on the lake bed.
Elmina is where the permanent European presence in sub-Saharan Africa began. In 1482 the Portuguese built São Jorge da Mina Castle here — hence the name, "the mine" — the oldest surviving European fortress south of the Sahara. Its purpose was to control the immensely rich Akan gold trade, which is why it was placed right on this stretch of coast, the Gold Coast.
Over the centuries, Elmina Castle changed hands and changed roles. In 1637 the Dutch West India Company seized it from the Portuguese, and under Dutch control (and later that of other powers) the fortress became one of the major centres for shipping enslaved people to the Americas. Captives were crammed into its dark, stifling dungeons before passing through the door of no return.
Next to the castle grew Elmina's colourful fishing port, with its hundreds of painted canoes. A short distance away stands Fort São Jago (Fort Coenraadsburg), built on the hill to protect the main fortress. Today Elmina Castle, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is both an extraordinary historic monument and a place of pilgrimage and mourning for the African diaspora.
A few kilometres from Elmina stands Cape Coast Castle, Ghana's other great monument to the slave trade. The Swedes founded it in the mid-17th century, and after several powers fought over it, it ended up in British hands. The British made it the headquarters of their Gold Coast trade and the colony's administrative capital until 1877, when the government moved to Accra.
Beneath its whitewashed courtyards lies the horror: underground dungeons where hundreds of people were locked up in inhuman conditions, without enough light or air, waiting for the slave ships. From there, captives passed through the infamous "door of no return", the narrow threshold opening onto the sea, through which they left in chains, never to see their homeland again. It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of Africans passed through the castles on this coast on their way to slavery in the Americas.
Cape Coast, also a World Heritage Site, is now a place of remembrance of global importance. In 2009 US President Barack Obama visited it with his family, and since then it has become a symbol of the diaspora reconnecting with Africa, especially through initiatives such as the "Year of Return". Visiting it is one of the most moving and necessary experiences the continent has to offer.
The Central Region is the heartland of the Fante people, one of the major Akan branches. They settled on this coast and built a dense network of states. The Fante were key intermediaries in trade with the Europeans and later rivals of the Ashanti of the interior, often siding with the British against them.
In 1868, in an early and remarkable experiment in African self-government, several Fante states formed the Fante Confederacy, with its own constitution and assembly. The aim was to defend their interests against the Ashanti and to negotiate with the British as equals. Although the confederacy was short-lived and was dismantled by the British themselves, it is remembered as a pioneering forerunner of Ghanaian constitutionalism and nationalism.
As the former colonial capital, Cape Coast was also an intellectual cradle: some of the country's most prestigious schools were founded here, and they educated much of the elite that would later lead the country to independence. The Central Region thus combines a dense historical legacy (castles, forts, Fante tradition and the asafo, the military and ceremonial companies of the coastal peoples) with a very strong cultural identity.
Inland from the coast of castles, the Central Region also holds one of the last refuges of the tropical rainforest that once covered southern Ghana: Kakum National Park, created in 1992 on a former forest reserve. It is an example of conservation driven partly by the local communities themselves.
Its most famous attraction is the canopy walkway, a suspended walkway made up of several sections. It hangs more than thirty metres above the ground, strung between the crowns of giant trees. Walking along it, swaying above the forest canopy, lets you see the forest from where the birds see it, and it is one of the most popular nature experiences in the country.
Kakum protects a lush ecosystem. It is home to forest elephants, monkeys, bongo antelopes and a huge variety of birds and butterflies, many of them hard to spot from the ground. In a region marked by the historical memory of the castles, Kakum offers a counterpoint: the natural Ghana, green and biodiverse. It is also a reminder of how important it is to conserve the country's last fragments of rainforest.
The Greater Accra region is the historic homeland of the Ga people. They were fishermen and traders who settled on this coast and organised their villages around chieftaincies and the yearly Homowo festival. Homowo celebrates the end of hunger with a ritual planting and shared meals. The city's name comes from a word for the black ants that were common in the area.
From the 17th century onwards, the Ga coast filled up with rival European forts, built almost on top of each other to compete for trade. The British built James Fort, the Dutch built Fort Ussher and the Danes built Fort Christiansborg, which in time became the seat of government. The historic districts of Jamestown and Usshertown grew up around these forts. Today they form Accra's old town and its most working-class quarter, with a lighthouse, crumbling colonial houses and a busy fishing life.
When the British moved the colonial capital from Cape Coast to Accra in 1877, the Ga town began its unstoppable rise. Its location, its port and later the railway made it the political and commercial centre of the Gold Coast, a role that has only grown ever since.
Accra is, above all, the city where modern Ghana was born. Nationalism erupted in its streets: in 1948 the colonial police fired on a peaceful march of African ex-servicemen in front of Christiansborg Castle, and the three marchers who were killed became martyrs who sped up the struggle for independence.
And it was here, at midnight on 6 March 1957, that Kwame Nkrumah declared independence before a huge crowd. The symbolic heart of that moment is now Black Star Square (also called Independence Square), overlooked by Independence Arch. A few blocks away, the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park and Mausoleum holds the founding father's remains beneath a marble monument shaped like a cut-off tree trunk, a symbol of a life and a project cut short.
Accra went from colonial capital to capital of the nation that pioneered African freedom, and then grew into a chaotic, vibrant metropolis of several million people. The bustling Makola market, the highlife and afrobeats music scene, the artists' studios and the energy of its neighbourhoods make Accra one of the most dynamic cities in West Africa, where the memory of independence lives side by side with contemporary creativity.
East of Accra, the coast changes character. Here, after crossing much of the country, the great Volta River meets the Atlantic Ocean in a wide, bright estuary. This is where you find Ada Foah, a quiet town of the Dangme (Adangbe) people, close relatives of the Ga. It is known for its sandbanks between river and sea and as a weekend getaway.
For centuries the area lived from trade and fishing, and Europeans were present here too. The Danes were especially active along this part of the coast, where they built forts and tried their hand at plantations. After the slave trade was abolished, the mouth of the Volta remained a route for transport and trade upriver into the interior.
Today Ada Foah is mainly a place for nature and relaxation, with boat trips on the estuary, river islands, water sports and birdwatching. It also hosts the Asafotufiami festival, when the Dangme community recalls its ancient migrations and battles. The Volta estuary is an ecologically sensitive area, a refuge for sea turtles and a wetland of international importance.
Northern Ghana is a different world from the Akan south: a vast savannah with a dry climate, home to dozens of peoples —Dagomba, Gonja, Mamprusi, Mossi, Dagaaba, Frafra— and historically turned towards the Sahel and the desert rather than the sea. The Ashanti never ruled here and the Europeans did not land here first; instead, kingdoms took shape that were tied to the great trans-Saharan trade.
Between the 15th and 17th centuries powerful states emerged: the Kingdom of Dagbon, of the Dagomba, and neighbouring Mamprugu, both linked to the legendary ancestor Naa Gbewaa; and the Kingdom of Gonja, founded by Mande-speaking warriors who came from the orbit of the Mali Empire. These kingdoms controlled trade routes carrying gold, kola nuts, cattle, salt and captives, and market towns such as Salaga became huge caravan hubs.
Islam also arrived along those routes, spread by Mande and Hausa traders and clerics. Unlike the south, which is mostly Christian or follows traditional religions, northern Ghana has had a Muslim majority for centuries, and its culture —mud architecture, dress, music, the organisation of the chieftaincies— reflects that deep Saharan heritage. The north is, in this way, the continental, Islamic and Sahelian face of a country the world usually knows only through its coast.
At the gates of Mole National Park, the small village of Larabanga is home to Ghana's oldest and most famous mosque, a gem of Sudano-Sahelian architecture. Built of mud, wood and poles —around the 15th century, according to local tradition—, it is a white building with organic shapes, conical towers and pointed buttresses bristling with the wooden beams that serve both as structure and as scaffolding for its regular upkeep.
This mosque belongs to the same architectural family as the great mud buildings of the Sahel, such as those of Mali, and bears witness to the early spread of Islam along the northern trade routes. Legend has it that a Muslim trader and cleric had a vision here that led him to found the mosque, and beside it stands a "mystic stone" around which other local traditions revolve.
Fragile and exposed to erosion, the Larabanga mosque has needed conservation work over the years to protect its mud from the rains. It is still a living place of worship and one of the best-loved monuments of northern Ghana, a symbol of a history that connects Ghana with the Islamic world of the Sahel and the Sahara.
Ghana's main wildlife destination is Mole National Park, in the north-west of the country and the largest protected area in its territory. Established as a park in the 1970s, it protects a vast wooded savannah ecosystem crossed by rivers and waterholes that draw animal life together, especially in the dry season.
Mole is famous for an experience that is rare in Africa: walking safaris. Escorted by armed rangers, visitors can walk through the savannah and get close to the elephants, as well as see antelopes, warthogs, baboons and a huge variety of birds. The park's lodge, perched on an escarpment above a waterhole, lets you watch from the terrace as elephants come down to drink and bathe, one of the most beloved images of Ghanaian tourism.
Like so many African parks, Mole faces the challenges of poaching, pressure on land from neighbouring communities and the need for conservation to benefit local people too. Even so, it is the great emblem of natural northern Ghana and proof that the country is not just history and coastline, but also savannah, elephants and wide open spaces under the Sahel sun.
The Volta Region in eastern Ghana is above all the land of the Ewe people, farmers and fishers whose culture spans both sides of the border with Togo and Benin. The Ewe were organised into many independent states. They share religious traditions, such as vodun worship, which is related to voodoo, and a rich culture of drumming and dance.
The region's modern history was shaped by the colonial carve-up. In the late 19th century Germany set up the colony of Togoland here, splitting Ewe territory in two. After Germany's defeat in the First World War, Togoland was divided between France and Britain; the British part, British Togoland, was administered together with the Gold Coast.
In 1956, on the eve of independence, a UN-supervised plebiscite was held in which the people of British Togoland voted, though not unanimously, to join the future Ghana rather than French Togo. So the Volta Region has been part of Ghana since the country was born in 1957. That history left a strong Ewe identity and, for decades, some claims and tensions over the border and the unity of the Ewe people.
The most striking feature of eastern Ghana is Lake Volta, the largest artificial lake in the world by surface area. It is not a natural feature. It was created by the flagship and most ambitious project of the Nkrumah era: the Akosombo Dam, built on the Volta River and opened in 1965.
The Volta River Project was Kwame Nkrumah's big bet on industrialisation. The dam was meant to generate cheap electricity to power an aluminium smelter and lift Ghana out of underdevelopment. The project reshaped the country's geography: flooding the Volta valley created an enormous lake, and tens of thousands of people had to be resettled as their villages went under water. It was both grand and controversial, a symbol of the hopes and tensions of Africa's early drive for development.
Today Lake Volta is a transport route, a source of fish and energy, and a destination for cruises and canoe trips between lakeside villages. It still supplies a large share of the country's electricity, although droughts and falling water levels show how vulnerable it is to climate change. The lake also has social problems, such as child labour in fishing, which Ghana is trying to tackle. Grand and complex, Lake Volta is the most visible physical legacy of the industrial dream of independence.
The Volta Region has the most mountainous and greenest landscape in Ghana. Here, near the border with Togo, is Wli Falls, the highest waterfall in West Africa, plunging in two great drops into a natural pool surrounded by forest and cliffs. Thousands of fruit bats live on the rock walls around it, and at dusk they fill the sky in an unforgettable natural spectacle. The hike to the falls through the forest is one of the country's best-loved outings.
Nearby, the village of Tafi Atome guards a different treasure: a colony of mona monkeys that the community considers sacred. For generations, the villagers have protected these monkeys as messengers of the gods, and today the animals, used to people, come up to visitors without fear. The Tafi Atome sanctuary is a pioneering model of conservation run by the village itself, where nature protection, traditional beliefs and community tourism support one another.
These mountains are also home to peaks such as Afadjato, one of the highest in Ghana, and to many beautiful trails, waterfalls and villages. The Volta Region has thus become the country's top destination for ecotourism and nature, very different from the historic coast or the northern savannah. It shows how local communities can turn their natural heritage into a source of pride and a living.
The Western Region is Ghana's southwestern corner and home of the Nzema people, an Akan branch related to the peoples of neighbouring Côte d'Ivoire. It was also one of the first areas to feel the European presence. At Axim, in the early 16th century, the Portuguese built Fort San Antonio, one of the oldest on the whole coast, to secure the gold trade at the western end of the Gold Coast.
Like the rest of the coastline, Axim and its forts passed through Portuguese, Dutch and British hands as the powers fought over gold and, later, the slave trade. Historically the region produced gold and timber, later rubber and minerals. Today it is also the centre of Ghana's oil industry: in 2007 the Jubilee field was discovered off this coast, putting Ghana on the map of crude oil producers.
Today Axim has a quiet feel, with long golden beaches, coconut palms and the nearby mouth of the Ankobra River, ideal for switching off far from the crowds. Its colonial forts, more modest than the great castles of Elmina or Cape Coast, are part of the group of Ghanaian coastal fortifications listed as a World Heritage Site.
A little further east, the small bay of Busua has become Ghana's laid-back surf hub and one of the favourite spots of backpackers and travellers. Its gentle, steady waves, ideal for beginners, have drawn a surf community over the years, along with a scene of beachfront guesthouses, fresh grilled fish and picture-postcard sunsets.
Busua and nearby villages such as Dixcove, with its 17th-century British fort, Fort Metal Cross, keep alive the fishing traditions of the Akan coast, with their colourful canoes and communal work. The mix of colonial history, fishing culture and relaxed atmosphere gives this part of the western coast a charm of its own, different from the historical weight of the great castles.
This stretch of coast is still relatively untouched by mass tourism, and it shows how the Western Region combines nature, unspoilt beaches and heritage. For many travellers, Busua is the gateway to Ghana at its calmest and brightest: Atlantic waves and fishing villages.
In Ghana's far southwest, hidden among mangroves, is one of Africa's most unusual settlements: Nzulezo, an entire village built on stilts in the middle of Lake Amansuri. Its name means "on the water", and the only way to reach it is a long canoe ride through the channels and wetland.
Tradition says that the ancestors of its people migrated from the region of the ancient Ghana Empire, guided by a snail, and settled on the water following a spiritual command. Whatever the exact origin, the community has lived on the lake for centuries: its wooden houses, the school, the church and even the streets are platforms and walkways raised above the water, and daily life moves by canoe.
Nzulezo and the Amansuri wetland form a fragile and valuable ecosystem, recognised as a Ramsar site of international importance and a refuge for birds, monkeys and crocodiles. The village is an extraordinary example of people adapting to life on the water and a model of community tourism, where the residents themselves run the visits and share a way of life found nowhere else on the continent.
Hardly anything that happened to Ghana happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
