Ciudad de la Paz is one of the strangest urban stories in Africa: a capital built from scratch in the middle of the rainforest, with six-lane avenues, glass towers, an 18-hole golf course and a luxury hotel, for a population still counted in the thousands. Work began in 2008 under the name Oyala. It was renamed Ciudad de la Paz in 2017, and on 2 January 2026 a decree made it the country's official capital in place of Malabo.
The move isn't just about administration. After the 2004 coup attempt, the government looked for an inland site, away from the coast and the risk of a landing from the sea, with a milder climate and road access from all of Río Muni. On top of that reasoning came a message about territorial rebalancing: take pressure off Malabo and Bata and bring the state to the geographic centre of the mainland. The project was designed by the Portuguese firm FAT – Future Architecture Thinking and built mostly by Chinese companies, with Polish, Brazilian and North Korean involvement.
This guide tells it like it is, with no postcard gloss and no propaganda: what you can actually see, what is finished and what still stands empty, how to get there, where to sleep and eat, and (very important) where not to point your camera. It is a fascinating destination if you are interested in architecture, politics and planned cities, but it is not a place with many services: practically all the tourist infrastructure in the area is a single hotel.
In 2008, Teodoro Obiang Nguema's government began building a new city called Oyala in the rainforest of inland Río Muni, next to the village of Mengomeyén. The idea was to move the capital away from vulnerable Malabo, on its island, to an inland site that was cooler and reachable by road from the whole mainland. The 2004 coup attempt weighed heavily on the decision. By 2013 the golf course and the six-lane highway were ready. The urban district was created in 2015 and Djibloho province in 2017, when the city was renamed Ciudad de la Paz. The Universidad Afro-Americana de África Central opened its campus in 2019 and took its first students in January 2020. On 2 January 2026, a presidential decree-law declared it the capital of the Republic of Equatorial Guinea and gave the institutions one year to move. In April 2026, during his apostolic journey to the country, Pope Leo XIV blessed the foundation stone of the future cathedral of Ciudad de la Paz.
Read the full history ↓The Fang borderland where the country's two presidents were born, where the second-largest Catholic church in Africa was built and where, since January 2026, the capital of the Republic has stood.
Read the history of The mainland east and the new capital →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Before there were six-lane avenues, there was rainforest here. The interior of Río Muni —the mainland part of Equatorial Guinea— has been Fang territory since the great migration that brought this people from the north into what is now southern Cameroon, Gabon and Spanish Guinea between the 18th and 19th centuries. Today the Fang are the country's largest ethnic group, and Fang is the language you hear in any market on the mainland.
Spain held nominal sovereignty over the coast from the Treaty of El Pardo in 1778, but it took a very long time to actually occupy the interior: the colonial administration was run from the island of Fernando Poo and from tiny island enclaves such as Elobey Chico, and it did not gain full control of inland Río Muni until well into the 20th century. These hills, 450 metres above sea level, with 2,100 mm of rain a year and humid forest, stayed outside any urban plan for generations.
The main settlement in the area is Mengomeyén, a village in what would later become the province of Djibloho, within the historical area of Wele-Nzas. It is a place of low houses, vegetable plots and a road, the kind you see again and again across the mainland interior. Its name, however, would end up on aviation charts around the world: in 2012 the international airport that now serves the country's capital was built there.
The other key feature of the landscape is the Wele River, the most important watercourse on Equatorial Guinea's mainland, which crosses Río Muni from east to west and flows into the Atlantic near Mbini. The 120 MW Djibloho dam was built on the Wele, and the bridges over that river are what connect the new city to the country's road network. Without that power and those bridges, the project simply would not have been viable.
Equatorial Guinea became independent from Spain on 12 October 1968. After the dictatorship of Francisco Macías Nguema and the August 1979 coup that brought his nephew Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo to power, the country entered a long period of authoritarian stability. The discovery of large oil and gas fields in the Gulf of Guinea, especially from the mid-1990s onwards, gave the state a spending power it had never had before.
In March 2004 a coup attempt to overthrow Obiang, involving foreign mercenaries, was foiled. The episode left a strategic lesson that is routinely cited as the origin of the project: the capital, Malabo, is on an island, Bioko, more than 200 kilometres from the mainland, exposed to a landing from the sea or to the seizure of a single airport. In security terms, a government concentrated there is an easy target.
Other arguments were added to this. Malabo and Bata held most of the population, services and economic activity, while the mainland interior lagged behind; a capital in the geographic centre of Río Muni, reachable by road from Bata, Mongomo, Ebebiyín and Evinayong, promised to rebalance the country. The chosen site also had a concrete, verifiable advantage: at 454 metres above sea level, the climate is noticeably milder than on the coast, with an annual average of 22,5 °C.
The mix of fear, oil money and a desire for legacy produced what that mix produces in many parts of the world: a capital built from scratch. Equatorial Guinea did not invent the genre —Brasília, Abuja, Yamoussoukro, Naypyidaw and Nur-Sultan are obvious precedents, and Yamoussoukro, in Côte d'Ivoire, even shares with this country the idea of crowning the new capital with an enormous basilica—, but it took it to an unusual scale relative to the size of its population.
Work began in 2008 under the name Oyala. The urban plan was drawn up by the Portuguese firm FAT – Future Architecture Thinking, with support from the AICEP Portugal Global agency, and most of the construction went to Chinese companies, with China State Construction Engineering Corporation (CSCEC) as the main contractor; Polish, Brazilian and North Korean companies also took part. The materials combined imported specialist components with stone and aggregates from quarries in the country itself.
The order in which things were built says a lot about the project. By 2013 the 18-hole golf course and the six-lane motorway were already finished, along with three bridges and the link to Mengomeyén airport, opened on 12 October 2012 —Independence Day— with a 3,000-metre runway able to take aircraft the size of a Boeing 747-400 and a stated cost of around 375 million dollars. The government buildings, the parliament and the presidential palace came later, and some are still unfinished.
The Grand Hotel Djibloho, the large five-star hotel complex that dominates the city, became its most visible landmark and its only truly working service for visitors: marble, a spa, four restaurants, swimming pools, a nightclub and eleven conference rooms for up to 1,200 people. Its gardens are home to three chimpanzees used to people, whom guests visit first thing in the morning — one of those scenes that sum up how unusual the place is.
The bet on education came at the same time. The Afro-American University of Central Africa (AAUCA) was created by decree on 2 December 2015 as the country's second public university; its campus of glass towers was inaugurated on 2 August 2019 and opened its doors to national and international students on 27 January 2020. Together with the hotel, it is the best-functioning building in the city and the one that gives it something like a stable population.
Power comes from the 120 MW Djibloho dam on the Wele, in the Djibloho-Evinayong district. Without it, a city of 8,150 hectares in the middle of the rainforest would have been unworkable. The plan covers a total of 81.5 km² and targets a population of between 160,000 and 200,000.
In 2015 the settlement was formally made an urban district within the province of Wele-Nzas, and in 2017 a province of its own, Djibloho, was created for it, the newest in the country. That same year the city was officially renamed Ciudad de la Paz ("City of Peace"), a statement-of-intent name that replaced the local place name Oyala. In practice all three names are used: official documents say Ciudad de la Paz, maps and hotel bookings still say Djibloho or Oyala, and local people say Djibloho.
The move of the administration began in early 2017, gradually and without much publicity. For almost a decade the city lived in an odd situation: the infrastructure of a capital, only half the functions of one, and a population estimated in 2022 at around 2,000 people in a city designed for a hundred times more. The accounts of the few travellers who made it here all describe the same picture: spotless boulevards with no cars, empty office towers and soldiers guarding the government perimeter.
The final step came on 2 January 2026. A decree-law signed by President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo declared Ciudad de la Paz, Djibloho, the capital of the Republic of Equatorial Guinea, replacing Malabo after more than a century of the capital being on the island —first Santa Isabel, then Malabo—. The law gives the Presidency of the Republic, the branches of government, the constitutional bodies, government agencies and state-owned companies one year from its entry into force to take the necessary steps to move and actually set up in the new capital.
The government presented the decision as a way of rebalancing the country: easing the pressure on Malabo and Bata, modernising public administration and bringing the state to the centre of the mainland. Critics see it mainly as a prestige and personal-security project paid for with oil revenue in a country consistently criticised for its lack of transparency and its human rights record. Both readings describe the same place.
2026 finds Ciudad de la Paz in the middle of the handover. Ministries are moving, embassies are weighing up what to do, and much of institutional life is still split between Malabo —home to the main international airport and the diplomatic corps— and Bata, which remains the largest city and the country's economic engine. The new capital is still only running at half speed, with the Grand Hotel Djibloho as its centre of gravity and the university as its most stable community.
On 21 April 2026, Pope Leo XIV arrived in Equatorial Guinea on the last leg of his apostolic journey through Africa, after Algeria, Cameroon and Angola. The next day, 22 April, he celebrated Mass at the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Mongomo and, at the entrance to the church, blessed the foundation stone of the future cathedral of Ciudad de la Paz. It was the most important symbolic gesture the city has received since it was founded: the new capital will have its own cathedral and its own place on the country's church map.
For travellers, the city offers a very particular experience. There is no old town, no historic market, no heritage: there is an idea of a city carried out in concrete, glass and asphalt in the middle of the equatorial rainforest, with a golf course finished before the parliament and three chimpanzees in the hotel garden. It is a destination for people interested in the architecture of power, planned cities and contemporary African politics, not for those looking for beaches, ruins or street life.
And it requires respecting rules that are no small matter here. This is the most security-sensitive area in the country: there is constant military surveillance, you must not photograph official buildings, palaces, residences, guard posts or uniformed personnel, and it is not a good idea to explore the government area on foot or on your own. Local operators arrange photography permits for their clients; using one of them is not only practical but also the sensible way to visit Africa's newest capital without any trouble.
