Long before any European flag, the territory that is now Equatorial Guinea was inhabited by Bantu-speaking peoples who arrived in different migratory waves and at very different times. The most remarkable of those stories is that of the Bubi, the original people of the island of Bioko. They came by sea from southern Cameroon and from the mainland coast of Río Muni —the most cautious academic estimates place those migrations between the 5th and 18th centuries— and developed a culture of their own on the island, with kings, mountain villages, a religion centred on the creator figure Rupé, and an economy based on farming, hunting and gathering.
On the mainland coast lived the Ndowé peoples, whom the Spanish would generically call "playeros" (beach people): communities of coves and river mouths who lived from fishing, canoe navigation and barter trade with passing ships. The Benga, the people of the island of Corisco and the islets of the Muni estuary, are one of those groups. Further inland, in a migratory movement that accelerated between the 18th and 19th centuries, the Fang were advancing. Today they are the country's largest group and are also present in northern Gabon and southern Cameroon: a society of lineages and scattered villages organised around the abaá, the house of the word, with no centralised authority.
Archaeology proved that this history did not begin with the Europeans, and in the most unexpected way. Construction work on Corisco's airport uncovered remains in 2004 that led to excavation campaigns directed by CSIC researcher Alfredo González-Ruibal: thirty sites forming the largest known Iron Age necropolis in Central Africa, with burials dating from 50 BCE to 1400 CE, and grave goods including pottery, axes, necklaces and ingot-currency. Laboratory analysis revealed that several objects thought to be iron were actually steel: an island of fifteen square kilometres forced a rethink of what was believed about African metallurgy.
The European arrival in the Gulf of Guinea was Portuguese and followed the logic of every voyage of the era: find the route south and mark on the map whatever turned up along the way. Around 1472, the navigator Fernão do Pó sighted a mountainous, densely forested island off the Cameroonian coast and named it Formosa, "beautiful"; the name did not stick, and the island ended up being called Fernando Poo after its discoverer, until in 1979 it took back its Bubi name, Bioko. On a 1 January —sources disagree on whether it was 1473 or 1475—, João de Santarém and Pêro Escobar sighted a tiny, uninhabited island six hundred kilometres out to sea and called it Ano Bom, "good year": Annobón.
Portugal brought the islands into its Atlantic network around 1474 and gave them the role that would shape their history for centuries: stopovers in the slave trade. Annobón, empty until then, was populated with enslaved Africans brought mainly from Angola via São Tomé, and from that forced mix came the Annobonese people and their language, Fá d'Ambô, a Portuguese-based Creole spoken nowhere else in the world. On Corisco, opposite the mouth of the Muni, the so-called Corisco Company was set up in 1648 for the same trade, with a small fort at Punta Joko.
On Fernando Poo, by contrast, early colonisation failed. Around 1507 the Portuguese tried to establish a sugar trading post near present-day Riaba, but Bubi resistance and tropical diseases put an end to the project. There was even a brief Dutch interlude between 1641 and 1648. For almost three centuries, the island remained Bubi territory and an occasional stop for ships: a name on European nautical charts and little more.
In the late 18th century, Spain wanted its own base in Africa to supply enslaved labour to its American colonies without relying on foreign middlemen. Portugal wanted to consolidate its positions in South America. The result was an explicit exchange: under the treaties of San Ildefonso (1777) and El Pardo (1778), Portugal ceded to Spain the islands of Fernando Poo and Annobón, plus trading rights on the mainland coast of the gulf, in return for territory in the River Plate basin and southern Brazil. The text made no secret of its purpose: it provided for the free dealing and trade of Africans between subjects of both crowns on those islands.
Taking possession was a disaster. The Count of Argelejo's expedition arrived in October 1778, but fever decimated the troops, the commander himself died, and the survivors eventually abandoned the attempt around 1780. For decades Spanish sovereignty over the gulf was purely nominal, exercised from very far away: in the empire's administrative scheme, the new possessions were attached to the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, based in Buenos Aires. It is a minor detail of Spanish colonial history and, at the same time, the historical argument that supporters of Annobón's independence invoked in 2025 to formally request a link with Argentina.
Meanwhile, the islands went their own way. Annobón organised itself, with a communal system of government that worked for generations without any European administration on top: that de facto autonomy is one of the keys to Annobonese identity and to its cultural distance from the rest of the country. And on Fernando Poo, the Bubi remained the masters of the island.
The city that is now the largest on Bioko was not founded by the Spanish. In 1827, with Spain unable to occupy the island, London obtained permission to set up a naval base on Fernando Poo. That year Captain William Fitzwilliam Owen founded a settlement on the north coast, on a natural harbour set inside an old crater, and called it Port Clarence in honour of the Duke of Clarence, the future William IV.
The aim was to fight the Atlantic slave trade. After the slave trade was abolished in the British Empire, the Royal Navy patrolled the Gulf of Guinea intercepting slave ships and needed a base where it could resupply and land the liberated Africans. Those rescued men and women arrived in Port Clarence, along with settlers brought from Sierra Leone —some 2.000 according to the figures in circulation—, missionaries and traders. Within fifteen years, an anchorage with no town had become a port with streets, a church and an English-speaking Creole population.
The British experiment ended in 1843: London never secured the final cession of the island from Madrid and moved its anti-slavery base to Sierra Leone. That same year, Brigadier Juan José de Lerena y Barry raised the Spanish flag in Port Clarence, renamed the city Santa Isabel in honour of Isabella II and signed treaties with local chiefs on the mainland and the smaller islands, among them the Benga king Bonkoro I of Corisco. Spain thus inherited a ready-made city, with a port, a mission and a Creole community it had not created.
Out of that crossroads came one of the most distinctive groups in the country's history: the Fernandinos. The name covers different realities. On one side, the descendants of the Africans freed from slave ships and of the settlers who came from Sierra Leone and Liberia, mostly Protestant and English-speaking. On the other, the "emancipados" and the people of mixed descent born from contact between Bubi, Europeans and newcomers, Catholic and Spanish in culture. Between 1845 and 1862 they were joined by the Black Cubans and political deportees that Spain sent to the island, in a settlement policy that was eventually thwarted by yellow fever.
That community left a linguistic mark that is still alive: Pichinglis, or Pichi, an English-based Creole related to the Krio of Sierra Leone, which in the late 20th century still had some 5.000 full speakers and served as a lingua franca for tens of thousands more people on Bioko.
During the 1880s and 1890s, the Fernandinos were the island's economic elite: cocoa planters, estate owners, commercial middlemen. Their decline was political and fairly precise. The new land rules of 1904 and 1905 openly favoured settlers from mainland Spain over Creole landowners, and Spanish and European capital gradually pushed the Fernandino families off the best estates. Their story —a Black, English-speaking, Protestant bourgeoisie in a Spanish, Catholic colony— is one of the least-told angles of Equatorial Guinea's past.
Spain had held rights to the mainland coast since 1778, but for more than a century its actual presence was limited to the islands. The mainland was territory claimed on paper and unknown on the ground. It was administered from Santa Isabel and, for the Muni, from tiny island enclaves: in 1875 the garrison moved from Corisco to Elobey Chico, an islet of 0,19 square kilometres at the mouth of the estuary which, between 1884 and 1926, housed the seat of the regional government and served as the de facto capital of Río Muni.
The push inland was the work of explorers and treaties. Manuel Iradier (1854-1911), from Álava, travelled the Muni basin on two expeditions and signed agreements with local chiefs that would later serve as the legal basis for Spanish claims; from 1885, dozens of villages on the mainland coast came formally under Madrid's protection. In 1903, Governor José de Ibarra y Autrán sent the ministry a list of 65 African chiefs from around Bata who recognised Spanish sovereignty.
The carve-up was settled by the Treaty of Paris, negotiated with France over the course of 1900. Spain kept a mainland enclave of some 26.000 square kilometres, against the 300.000 it had originally claimed, bounded by the 9th meridian east of Paris to the east, the Campo River to the north and the Muni estuary to the south. In practice, it was the acceptance of a diplomatic defeat. A royal decree of 12 July 1904 unified the islands and the mainland as the "Spanish Territories of the Gulf of Guinea", renamed Spanish Guinea in 1926.
Real occupation of the interior came later still. Military campaigns against Fang society ran throughout the 1920s, and the colonial administration only declared the "pacification" complete around 1929: a century and a half after the Treaty of El Pardo.
The colony's economic engine was the cocoa of Fernando Poo, complemented by coffee from the highlands and by timber —okoumé above all— from the mainland. Volcanic soil and rain made the island ideal for growing it, and from the late 19th century the estates of Spanish, Portuguese, German and Fernandino planters turned the colony into a prosperous agricultural export region. The problem was always the same: the island did not have enough people to work them.
The solution was to import labour, and this is the hardest part of the story. A labour treaty signed with Liberia in 1914 brought up to 15.000 workers to Fernando Poo, shipped by the German line Woermann-Linie. In 1930, a commission of inquiry from the International Labour Organization concluded that the labourers had been recruited under criminal coercion barely distinguishable from slave raids, and the agreement was cancelled. Nigeria took over: by around 1942 an estimated 20.000 Igbo and Ibibio workers had arrived clandestinely by canoe from Nigeria's eastern provinces, and that same year a formal labour treaty was signed. By 1968, around 100.000 Nigerians were living in Spanish Guinea.
The Bubi, meanwhile, resisted forced recruitment. There were uprisings in 1898 and 1910, and episodes of intermittent armed resistance that made the island very hard to control; many Bubi fled into the forest rather than work on the estates. In 1904, chief Sas Ebuera refused to hand over the required quota of workers, was arrested and died in custody. In 1906 other chiefs rose up and were subdued by force. That same year, 1904, saw the start of the long reign of Malabo Lopelo Melaka, the last Bubi king, which lasted until 1937 and whose name the country's historic capital bears today.
The Spanish Civil War reached the Gulf of Guinea two months late and in the opposite direction to the mother country: the colony initially stayed loyal to the Republican government. The military units and the Colonial Guard rebelled on 19 September 1936 and, after several weeks of operations, the rebels controlled the whole territory by around 14 October. From then on, Guinea was under Francoist administration.
Decolonisation pressure from the United Nations, which in the 1950s began demanding information on non-self-governing territories, forced Madrid to recast the relationship. The way out it chose was to deny there was a colony at all: in 1959 the territory stopped being a colony and formally became two Spanish provinces —Fernando Poo, with its capital in Santa Isabel, and Río Muni, with its capital in Bata—, with local elections and the first Equatoguinean deputies in the Cortes. On paper, Guineans became Spaniards with full rights; in practice, colonial society remained deeply unequal.
The provincial fiction was not enough. In December 1963, a referendum approved an autonomy regime with its own government, led by Bonifacio Ondó Edú at the head of an Equatoguinean council of ministers. Outside the territory, in Cameroon and Gabon, nationalist movements such as IPGE and MONALIGE had been active for years, demanding outright independence. Autonomy was, in practice, a short transition towards the inevitable.
Independence was negotiated at a constitutional conference in Madrid between 1967 and 1968, with the United Nations pushing the timetable and with an underlying rift that would shape everything that followed: much of the Bubi and Fernandino elite on Fernando Poo feared falling under the rule of the Fang mainland majority and even proposed separate independence for the island, which was far richer thanks to cocoa.
The constitution was put to a referendum on 11 August 1968, under UN supervision, and approved with 64,3 % of the vote. General elections were held on 22 September, with a presidential run-off on the 29th. Francisco Macías Nguema —a Fang from the Mongomo area, a former interpreter in the colonial courts, mayor of his town and vice-president of the autonomous government— defeated Bonifacio Ondó Edú, head of the autonomous government and the continuity candidate. It was the only competitive election the country has had to this day.
Independence was proclaimed on 12 October 1968. Equatorial Guinea was born as a small country that was, by the African standards of the time, relatively prosperous: a cocoa exporter with a high per capita income and a dense network of missions, schools and clinics. It was also born with its economy in the hands of a few thousand Spanish settlers, with a hundred thousand Nigerian workers on the estates, and with a newly built state apparatus sitting on a society split between the island and the mainland.
The constitutional project lasted months. In March 1969, amid a clash with Spain and anti-Spanish riots in Bata, Foreign Minister Atanasio Ndongo Miyone was accused of attempting a coup and died in custody; Bonifacio Ondó Edú, Macías's electoral rival, was arrested and executed in Black Beach prison. That was the breaking point: there followed the suspension of constitutional guarantees in 1971, the merger of all political forces into a single party, the PUNT, and in July 1972 Macías's proclamation as president for life.
The regime rested on the party, the youth militia and an extreme personality cult. It systematically persecuted educated people —the word "intellectual" was even banned from official language—, closed private schools in 1975, harassed and then banned Catholic worship in a mostly Catholic country, and Africanised names by decree: in 1973 Santa Isabel was renamed Malabo, and in 1976 the president himself took the name Masie Nguema Biyogo. The economy collapsed: in 1976 Nigeria evacuated tens of thousands of labourers —the figures given by sources range from 25.000 to 45.000—, citing mistreatment, and with them went cocoa production, which was practically the country's entire export income.
The figures for the repression are disputed and should be presented as what they are: estimates. Those cited in studies of the period speak of between 20.000 and 80.000 dead, and of at least 101.000 people who had fled the country by 1978, out of a total population of around 300.000. In other words: between a third and a half of the inhabitants died or went into exile. Among the documented episodes is the mass execution of alleged conspirators in the Malabo stadium on a Christmas Eve during the decade —sources date it to 1969 or 1975, with figures of around a hundred and fifty people—. In the international memory of those years, Equatorial Guinea stood as an extreme case of state collapse and of violence against its own people.
On 3 August 1979, Lieutenant Colonel Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo —Macías's nephew, born in the village of Acoacán in the Mongomo district, and until then in charge of Black Beach prison— led the coup that overthrew his uncle. Macías was captured on 18 August, tried by a military tribunal for genocide and other crimes, sentenced to death on 29 September 1979 and executed by firing squad that same day. Obiang took over the presidency in October.
The country he inherited was in ruins: no trained professionals, no working school system, abandoned plantations and empty coffers. The first years were about basic reconstruction and reopening to the outside world: relations with Spain were restored, the country joined the CFA franc zone in 1985 and a constitution was approved in 1982. In 1991 a multi-party system was formally adopted, with the PDGE —the president's party— as the overwhelmingly dominant force ever since.
Two episodes have shaped politics in recent decades. In March 2004 a coup attempt involving foreign mercenaries was foiled. Known internationally as the "Wonga coup", it was led by former British officer Simon Mann. The episode left behind a security obsession that explains many later decisions, including moving the capital inland. And in 2011 a constitutional reform created the vice presidency, a post held since 2016 by Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, the president's son, as part of a family succession arrangement.
Obiang has been re-elected again and again in elections disputed by the opposition and by international observers, and he is now the world's longest-serving head of State among those who don't sit on a throne. Organisations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have consistently documented restrictions on freedom of expression, assembly and association, arrests of opposition figures and reports of ill-treatment. The government rejects these accusations and in 2006 signed a national decree against torture. It is an open debate with sharply opposed positions, and any honest reading of the country has to include it.
Hydrocarbon exploration began in 1980, when Spain's Hispanoil, through the joint venture GEPSA, found gas in the Alba structure off Bioko. With no market in sight, the company pulled out of the country in 1990. The turning point came in March 1995, when Mobil struck the Zafiro field, holding around 1,100 million barrels. The first crude flowed in August 1996, and within a few years production had multiplied several times over. In 1999 Triton discovered the Ceiba field, this time in mainland waters. By around 2005 the country's major fields together topped 425,000 barrels a day. Equatorial Guinea had become one of the largest producers in sub-Saharan Africa, and its GDP per capita placed it among the highest in the world on paper.
That statistic never described people's lives well. Wealth became concentrated, and ever since the country has faced international criticism for a lack of transparency in how oil revenue is managed. And the boom had an expiry date: the fields matured, and production fell from 104.5 million barrels in 2010 to 28.9 million in 2024. Gross national income per capita dropped from about 14,560 dollars in 2008 to about 4,134 in 2024, and the economy shrank by around 6 % in 2025. The poverty rate, which stood at 76.8 % in 2006, was estimated at 50.7 % in 2023.
That backdrop explains the recent years. On 19 May 2025, the International Court of Justice ruled on the dispute with Gabon over the islands of Mbañé, Cocoteros and Conga. It rejected the validity of the 1974 Bata Convention, relied on the 1900 Franco-Spanish treaty and confirmed Equatorial Guinea's sovereignty over the islets, ending half a century of dispute in an area of interest for oil. On 2 January 2026, a presidential decree-law declared Ciudad de la Paz (Djibloho) the capital of the Republic in place of Malabo. Ciudad de la Paz is the planned city built from scratch in the jungle of the mainland interior, and the decree allowed one year for the Presidency, the branches of State and public bodies to actually move there. In April 2026, Pope Leo XIV made the first papal visit in the country's history.
So this is where Equatorial Guinea stands today. It has around 1.7 million inhabitants and is the only African country where Spanish is an official language —alongside French, added in 1998, and Portuguese, in 2010. It is a State trying to reinvent its economy as the oil runs out, and one of the least visited countries on the planet, with a natural and colonial heritage that almost nobody knows.
The 4 histories, one after another. Use the buttons above to jump to the one you want.
Bioko is the largest part of the Cameroon volcanic line that rises above the sea. This chain of volcanoes starts deep inside the continent, runs through Mount Cameroon and continues out to sea through Bioko, Príncipe, São Tomé and Annobón. The island is made up of three large shield volcanoes stacked together: Pico Basilé in the north, at 3,011 metres, the central massif and the southern massif, whose summit —the peak of the Gran Caldera— reaches 2,261 metres.
Unlike the other islands in the chain, Bioko is not an isolated oceanic volcano. It sits on the continental shelf and was cut off from Africa only about 10,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age, when sea levels rose. That geological detail explains its biology: Bioko's wildlife is continental, but it has spent ten millennia evolving on its own. That is where the endemic subspecies that now make it famous among primatologists come from.
The terrain shapes everything else. Malabo's natural harbour sits on the flooded rim of an ancient crater. The highlands of the Moka valley, over a thousand metres up, have meadows, tree ferns, crater lakes —Biao and Loreto— and a cool, misty climate that is nothing like the heat of the coast. And the southern slope, which takes the Atlantic monsoon head-on, is one of the rainiest places on the planet: while Malabo gets about 1,930 millimetres of rain a year, Ureca records around 10,450, the highest figure on the African continent.
Pico Basilé is now considered a dormant volcano; its last known eruption was in 1923. The southern massif is younger still: geological studies place eruptive activity within the last two thousand years, which explains the fertile soil and the black sand on the southern beaches.
The Bubi are the island's original people and are still its largest group today, at around 58 % of the island's population. They arrived by sea from the mainland. They built a society of mountain villages, local chiefdoms and kings whose authority was recognised across large areas. Their economy rested on highland farming, hunting and gathering, and their religion centred on Rupé, the creator deity.
Two names sum up their modern history. King Moka —Möókáta in the Bubi language— ruled from the southern highlands in the 19th century. Sources credit him with one reign between 1835 and 1845 and another from 1875 until the end of the century, within the Bahítáari dynasty, and the Moka valley is named after him. The last king was Malabo Lopelo Melaka, who reigned from 1904 to 1937, by then under full colonial rule. The capital has carried his name since 1973.
In between came the resistance. The Bubi opposed forced recruitment for the cocoa estates with uprisings in 1898 and 1910 and with bouts of intermittent armed resistance. Many fled into the forest rather than work on the plantations. In 1904 chief Sas Ebuera refused to hand over the required quota of workers, was arrested and died in custody; in 1906 other chiefs rose up and were put down by force. The town of Luba, called San Carlos in colonial times, was renamed after independence in memory of a Bubi chief from those revolts.
That history has also left a very visible blend of beliefs: the Virgin of Bisila, whose white statue stands at around 2,800 metres on the slopes of Pico Basilé. In Bubi tradition, Bisila is a protective mother figure linked to the island and to motherhood. Catholic missionaries merged her with devotion to the Virgin Mary, and today she is the patron of Bioko and a place of pilgrimage.
The country's historic capital was born on 25 December 1827, when British captain William Fitzwilliam Owen founded Port Clarence on the flooded rim of a crater on the north coast. It was an anti-slavery base for the Royal Navy. With Africans freed from slave ships and settlers brought from Sierra Leone, it became an English-speaking Creole town before it was ever Spanish.
In 1843 Brigadier Juan José de Lerena took effective possession and renamed it Santa Isabel, after Isabella II. From the mid-19th century, governors, Claretian missionaries and settlers arrived. The town gained a colonial centre of wooden verandas and tree-lined squares, plus the neo-Gothic Santa Isabel Cathedral, built between 1897 and 1916. Its two forty-metre towers are still the city's most recognisable skyline. An electrical fire damaged it in 2020, and restoration work dragged on afterwards.
In 1973, as part of the policy of Africanising place names, Santa Isabel became Malabo, after the last Bubi king, just as Pico de Santa Isabel became Pico Basilé. The city remained the national capital for another half century and lived through the years of dictatorship and economic collapse. From the 1990s it filled up with oil companies, hotels and new towers alongside the old colonial quarter. Nearby rose the Sipopo complex, host to international summits.
On 2 January 2026, a decree-law moved the capital to Ciudad de la Paz. After almost two centuries as a capital —first colonial, then national— Malabo lost its administrative rank. But it keeps the main international airport, the diplomatic corps and the economic and cultural weight that make it, in practice, the country's leading city.
For almost a century, cocoa was Bioko's economy. The volcanic soil and constant rain made the island an exceptional place to grow it, and from the late 19th century estates covered the northern and central lowlands. Everything was built around them: roads, warehouses, ports and a layered colonial society of planters from mainland Spain, Fernandino landowners and labourers brought in from elsewhere.
Higher up, the crop was different. The cooler slopes of Pico Basilé and the highlands of the Moka valley filled with coffee plantations that coexisted with the cocoa below and shaped the mid-mountain villages. Catholic missions and schools came with the plantations, and even in colonial times Moka was where people went up to escape the heat of the coast.
The harvest left through two ports: Santa Isabel in the north and San Carlos —now Luba— on the south-west coast. Thanks to its sheltered bay, San Carlos became the island's second port and shipped cocoa and, later, timber. Before that, in the 19th century, the same bay had been one of the places tied to the maritime slave trade in the gulf.
The deep south stayed out of the business, and that exclusion proved decisive. With no roads to get the harvest out, no ports and rain that made drying the beans impossible, the southern slope never turned into farmland. While the north was covered with estates, the south kept its rainforest intact: the economic neglect of those days is the reason what exists there today still exists.
Bioko's southern massif holds one of Africa's least-known biological treasures. The Gran Caldera de Luba is a crater about five kilometres across, with walls over a thousand metres high, covered in forest from top to bottom. Seven species of day-active monkeys live there at very high densities, with surveys recording between 1.2 and 3.3 group encounters per square kilometre. Four of those primates are represented by subspecies found nowhere else in the world: Pennant's red colobus, the black colobus, Preuss's monkey and the red-eared guenon. Add to them the drill, one of the most threatened primates on the continent.
The second treasure is on the coast. The black-sand beaches of the south —Moraka, Moaba and their neighbours towards Ureca and Punta de Santiago— are among the most important nesting sites in the Gulf of Guinea for four species of sea turtle: leatherback, green, hawksbill and olive ridley. The season runs from November to March, and the star is the leatherback, the world's largest marine reptile.
Legal protection came late. Law 8/1988 on wildlife identified the area as a priority, and Law 4/2000 created the National System of Protected Areas: thirteen areas, about 586,000 hectares, close to 18.5 % of the national territory. The Caldera de Luba was declared a Scientific Reserve covering 51,000 hectares. Between 1995 and 1998 the Spanish NGO Amigos de Doñana ran a pioneering programme in the south of the island. In 1998 the Bioko Biodiversity Protection Program got under way, a partnership between the National University of Equatorial Guinea, Drexel University in Philadelphia and INDEFOR-AP. It runs camps at Moraka and Moaba, operates the centre in Moka and maintains the longest series of surveys of the island's wildlife.
The main threat hasn't changed: hunting for bushmeat to supply urban markets. Surveys show primate populations that have fallen since the first counts in 1991 and have not recovered their original levels. And the modern road that runs down from the Luba area to Ureca, which ended the isolation of the southern villages, also shortened the hunters' route. Law 6/2025, the new protected areas law, explicitly backs ecotourism and carbon credits as an economic alternative.
The discovery of the Zafiro field in March 1995, in waters north-west of the island, and the start of gas production at Alba changed the scale of everything. Bioko became the industry's logistics base. At Punta Europa, west of Malabo, a gas complex went up with the AMPCO methanol plant and, later, the liquefied natural gas plant. In Luba, in 2004, Luba Freeport was developed: a service terminal for offshore oil operations that gave the old cocoa bay a new role.
The island then went through a cycle of public works and international profile-raising: hotels, avenues, the Sipopo complex for African Union summits, an enlarged airport. It also saw a very visible gap between the industry's world and the daily life of most people, and an extreme dependence on a single resource.
That resource began to run out. National crude production fell from 104.5 million barrels in 2010 to 28.9 million in 2024, dragging per capita income and activity down with it. The country's stated answer lies in gas, in diversification and, more and more explicitly in official speeches, in nature tourism: exactly what southern Bioko can offer.
In January 2026, Bioko also lost its status as the political capital. The island that was once Fernando Poo produced the cocoa that kept the colony going and was home to the capital for almost two centuries. Now it faces a new role still to be defined: it remains the country's economic and diplomatic hub, but the institutional centre of gravity has shifted to the mainland.
The first misunderstanding about Río Muni is in the name: there is no river called Muni. What does exist is a large estuary in the far south-west, where half a dozen waterways —the Mitong, the Congüe, the Mandyani, the Mitemele, the Utamboni and the Mven— meet before flowing into the Atlantic through Corisco Bay. Its roughly 800 square kilometres of brackish water form a natural border with Gabon. The estuary ended up giving its name to the whole mainland part of the country: about 26,017 square kilometres, home to around 72 % of the national population.
The territory's real river backbone is a different one: the Wele, which crosses it from east to west and reaches the sea near Mbini. Its basin is the largest in the country, and on it stand the 120 MW Djibloho hydroelectric dam and the bridges that hold the inland road network together. On 3 August 2012 the 1,057-metre bridge between Bolondo and Mbini opened, creating the first reliable road route to the south of Río Muni.
The land rises from the coast towards the interior: a coastal plain, then the Niefang range at 300 to 1,250 metres, and forested hills that stretch all the way to the Gabon border. Administratively, the region is now split into five provinces —Litoral, Centro Sur, Kié-Ntem, Wele-Nzas and Djibloho, the last one created in 2017— with Bata as its largest city.
That geography of dense forest and deep river valleys explains the territory's history. With no natural harbours, no easy routes inland and a population scattered across villages, the interior of Río Muni was for centuries a place where no outside administration ever truly managed to take hold.
For centuries the mainland coast was the territory of the Ndowé peoples, whom the Spanish generically called "playeros" (beach people): communities settled in coves, river mouths and islands, living from fishing, canoe navigation and barter with the European ships that had been calling in the gulf since the 15th century. The Benga of Corisco and the estuary are one of those groups, with their own kings, recognised by the European powers as people to negotiate with.
That trade had a terrible side. Before the slave trade was abolished in the British Empire, the Muni estuary was a major embarkation point: captives taken in the interior were brought to the coast, moved to Corisco and shipped to the Americas. Cogo, today a fishing village and the gateway to the estuary reserve, was one of those departure points.
Meanwhile the Fang were advancing from the interior, in a migration that sped up between the 18th and 19th centuries and carried them from the forested interior towards the Atlantic, settling southern present-day Cameroon, northern Gabon and practically the whole interior of mainland Guinea. Their society was organised in lineages and scattered villages, with no central authority, around the abaá, or house of the word; their economy combined slash-and-burn farming —cassava, plantain, cocoyam, yam—, hunting, gathering and trade with the coastal peoples, who acted as middlemen with the Europeans.
Two features of that culture travelled far. One is the mvet, the harp-zither with which Fang bards recite the people's epic cycles for hours. The other is the ritual sculpture tied to ancestor worship: Fang reliquary figures and masks are among the best-known African pieces in Western museums, and they had an enormous influence on European art in the early 20th century.
For almost a century, Spain governed the mainland without setting foot on it. The administration was run from Santa Isabel and, for the Muni, from islets: in 1875 the garrison moved from Corisco to Elobey Chico, barely 0,19 square kilometres at the mouth of the estuary, which between 1884 and 1926 housed the seat of the regional government. For four decades, a nineteen-hectare island was the de facto capital of Río Muni.
It was explorers who opened the way into the interior. Manuel Iradier, from Álava, travelled the Muni basin on two expeditions and signed treaties with local chiefs; from 1885 the coastal villages gradually came under Madrid's protection, and in 1903 Governor José de Ibarra y Autrán sent the ministry a list of 65 African chiefs from around Bata who recognised Spanish sovereignty. Cogo was called Puerto Iradier for much of the colonial period.
The region's main city, however, has a paradoxical origin: it was founded by the French. In 1900, France set up a small trading post at that point on the coast, and that same year the Treaty of Paris awarded the territory to Spain; Bata passed into Spanish hands the following year. Growth was extremely slow: in 1907 it had 237 inhabitants, 37 of them European. In 1926, as the occupation of the interior advanced, the colonial government moved its seat from Elobey Chico to Cogo, and the little island was abandoned and swallowed by the forest.
The "pacification" of the Fang interior, with military campaigns throughout the 1920s, was declared complete around 1929. The administrative posts of the interior —Evinayong among them, set at 631 metres above sea level for a better climate and a clear view over the territory— came with offices, a school, a Catholic mission and shops, and their job was to administer, evangelise and channel the production of cocoa, coffee and bananas to the coast.
If cocoa defined the island, timber defined the mainland. The rainforest of Río Muni became one of the economic pillars of Spanish Guinea and later of the independent country, with okoumé as the star species —a light, pale wood, ideal for plywood— alongside ilomba, akom and iroko. Logging tracks opened up the interior before any road built for people: one of them, the Mitom-Kogo track, would end up marking the southern boundary of the future Monte Alén National Park.
The territory was organised around that exploitation. Bata grew as a timber and coffee port, with administrative buildings, a Catholic mission and a modest street plan; the Cathedral of Santiago Apóstol y Nuestra Señora del Pilar, begun in the early 1950s in a colonial neo-Gothic style, is the most visible architectural trace of that period and is now listed as a National Heritage Monument. In the interior, the districts combined cocoa, coffee and bananas with logging.
Independence and the years that followed broke that chain. In 1969 anti-Spanish riots broke out in Bata, triggering the mass departure of settlers and technicians from Spain; over the following decade the plantations stopped producing, trade ground to a halt and the roads of the interior deteriorated until they were almost impassable. For towns like Evinayong, which lived off channelling farm produce to the coast, the break was structural.
Timber never entirely disappeared —together with coffee, it is still the traditional export of the port of Bata, today one of the deepest in the region—, but the country's scale changed when oil appeared, and with it the relative weight of the forest in the economy.
The forest of the Niefang range is no ordinary forest: it is a remnant of the great Guineo-Congolian rainforest and served as a Pleistocene refuge, one of those mountain enclaves that held on to moisture when the climate dried out and the African forest broke apart. That is why it holds a disproportionate share of biodiversity, and why Monte Alén ended up as the centrepiece of the country's protected-area system.
Its protection was built up in layers: Law 8/1988 on wildlife, its declaration as a national park in the early 1990s, Decree-Law 3/1997, which redrew its boundaries, and Law 4/2000, which brought it into the National System of Protected Areas. The surface figures in circulation range from 1.200 to 2.000 square kilometres depending on the boundaries and the source. Surveys by the European ECOFAC programme, which also opened trails, built basic infrastructure and trained the local eco-guides, produced the numbers that define the place today: 109 mammal species —98 % of those recorded in the whole mainland region—, 16 primates, 233 bird species, 65 reptiles and 57 confirmed amphibians, among them the Goliath frog, the largest frog in the world. The park is home to western lowland gorillas, chimpanzees, forest elephants and mandrills.
The region's other great protected area is the Muni estuary, declared a Nature Reserve and recognised on 2 June 2003 by the Ramsar Convention as a wetland of international importance, with site number 1311 and 80.000 hectares: mangroves, flooded forest and peat meadows that shelter migratory birds, two species of crocodile and the African manatee, which has its only refuge in the whole country here.
The legal framework went through a long gap: Law 4/2000 was repealed in 2003 and the country went more than two decades without a specific law on the declaration, management and funding of protected areas, with INDEFOR-AP handling day-to-day management. In 2025 Law 6/2025 was enacted, reorganising the system, aiming at the international commitment to protect at least 30 % of the territory by 2030 and bringing in ecotourism and carbon credits. The usual threats are still there: hunting for bushmeat and logging pressure in the surrounding areas.
Bata was the big mainland winner of the oil boom. Internal migration from the interior of Río Muni and the arrival of foreign workers sent its population soaring to the 309.345 inhabitants recorded in the 2015 census, overtaking Malabo and making it the country's most populous city. With that came avenues, high-rise buildings, a modernised port, the second international airport and campuses of the National University of Equatorial Guinea alongside a branch of Spain's UNED, which gave it a young, student character.
The most visible urban transformation is the seafront promenade: some ten kilometres of waterfront with palm trees, gardens and pedestrian lanes. At its northern end stands the Torre de la Libertad, inaugurated on 12 October 2011 —independence day—, a flame-shaped tower with a panoramic viewing deck and a revolving restaurant. The Estadio de Bata hosted the Africa Cup of Nations that the country co-organised with Gabon in 2012, and hosted it again in 2015, after Morocco withdrew.
On 7 March 2021, a series of explosions at the Nkoantoma military barracks flattened homes and buildings over a wide radius. Official figures put the toll at around 105-107 dead and more than 600 injured: the worst civilian tragedy in the country's history. The government blamed the disaster on the negligent storage of explosives, set off by a nearby farm fire; human rights organisations and the Associated Press questioned that account after finding no evidence of farming activity in the area, and the official investigation did not clear up the doubts. The 7-M Monument was built on the site, now a place of collective mourning and an essential stop for understanding the contemporary city.
With the move of the capital to Ciudad de la Paz in January 2026, the country's political centre of gravity shifted for good to the mainland. Bata remained its great urban, economic and service hub, and the unavoidable gateway to Río Muni and its forest.
The mainland east —the provinces of Kié-Ntem and Wele-Nzas, plus Djibloho, created in 2017— is the demographic heart of Fang country. Rivers shape the territory: the Ntem, which at its Atlantic mouth is called the Campo River, and smaller courses such as the Kié and the Bolo. The Fang peoples of this area lived and traded along those rivers without any line drawn in Europe meaning anything to them.
The document that created today's geography is the Treaty of Paris of 1900, which set the limits of the Spanish mainland enclave: the meridian 9 east of Paris to the east, the Campo River to the north and the Muni estuary to the south. That line produced a curious geometric result: the north-eastern corner of the territory ended up touching both Cameroon —German at the time, later under French mandate— and French Gabon. Ebebiyín grew on that point where three sovereignties meet.
Cultural continuity across the borders is still the region's deepest trait: the Fang of Kié-Ntem, those of Woleu-Ntem in Gabon and those of Cameroon's South Region share language, kinship and customs. Europe drew the border; history supplied the kinship.
The colonial presence took shape as it did in so many other corners: an administrative post, a Catholic mission and a school. In 1950 the Gothic-style cathedral of Ebebiyín was completed, today one of the country's three working cathedrals together with those of Malabo and Bata; its own diocese was created on 15 October 1982. The economy was organised around cocoa, coffee and timber, three products that still set the rhythm of the province's rural calendar.
Nothing in Mongomo's colonial history hinted at its later role. It was a border town on the eastern edge of the territory, about four kilometres from Gabon, with a Catholic mission, a market and little else. What changed it was politics.
Francisco Macías Nguema, the country's first president, was a Fang from this area and had been the town's mayor before independence. Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, his nephew and the man who overthrew him on 3 August 1979, was born in the village of Acoacán, in the Mongomo district. Both heads of state Equatorial Guinea has had since 1968 came from the same corner of the country, and that made Mongomo the geographical reference for what the international press calls "the Mongomo clan".
The practical consequence is visible on every corner. A town of just over fifty thousand people on the eastern edge of a small country has an international airport a few kilometres away, a stadium of continental standard, the country's only hospitality university, the National Institute of Hydrocarbon Technology, a provincial hospital and one of the largest churches in Africa. All of it was paid for with the oil revenue that began to flow strongly from the mid-1990s.
The demographic figure that best sums up the phenomenon: of the city's roughly 53.500 inhabitants, around 3.800 are Chinese workers tied to the construction companies that built much of modern Mongomo. In 2015, the local stadium was one of the venues of the Africa Cup of Nations that the country organised at short notice after Morocco withdrew.
The Immaculate Conception is the patron saint of Equatorial Guinea, and her main shrine is in Mongomo. The Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception was built between 2006 and 2011, paid for entirely by the State and carried out by the Italian firm Makinen Venture, with the interior finishes by Ruffini Decorazioni.
The architectural gesture that defines it is its outer colonnade of Roman travertine, explicitly inspired by St Peter's Square in the Vatican: it is not a nod, it is a literal homage that anyone who has been to Rome recognises at first glance. The interior holds around a thousand worshippers and houses, among other devotional pieces, a replica of the Esperanza Macarena of Seville, a direct link with the country's Spanish Catholic heritage. The complex includes a papal residence, built in anticipation of a papal visit that would take fifteen years to arrive.
The consecration took place on 7 December 2011, the eve of the feast of the Immaculate Conception, presided over by the Nigerian cardinal Francis Arinze on behalf of Benedict XVI. It was the country's first basilica and was given the rank of minor basilica; it is the seat of the diocese of Mongomo, created on 1 April 2017 by Pope Francis together with that of Evinayong.
The figures put it clearly in context: it is the largest religious building in Central Africa and the second-largest Catholic church on the continent, surpassed only by the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace in Yamoussoukro, Ivory Coast, another monumental work built by a head of state in his home town. Every 8 December, the patronal feast turns Mongomo into the religious centre of the country, with pilgrims arriving from Bata, Malabo and the whole mainland.
In March 2004 a coup attempt involving foreign mercenaries was foiled. The episode left a strategic lesson that is routinely cited as the origin of the project: the capital, Malabo, was on an island more than two hundred kilometres from the mainland, exposed to a landing or to the seizure of a single airport. Added to that was a regional-development argument: a capital at the geographical centre of Río Muni, reachable by road from Bata, Mongomo, Ebebiyín and Evinayong, promised to rebalance a country where everything was concentrated in two cities.
Work began in 2008 under the name Oyala, near the village of Mengomeyén, at about 450 metres above sea level —which gives an annual average of 22,5 °C, noticeably milder than the coast—. The urban plan was drawn up by the Portuguese studio FAT, and most of the construction went to Chinese companies, with China State Construction Engineering Corporation as main contractor. The scale of the plan: 8.150 hectares and a target population of between 160.000 and 200.000 inhabitants.
The order in which things were built says a lot about the project. By 2013 the 18-hole golf course, the six-lane motorway and three bridges were already finished, as well as Mengomeyén International Airport, opened on 12 October 2012 with a 3.000-metre runway and a declared cost of around 375 million dollars. The government buildings, the parliament and the presidential palace came later. The five-star Grand Hotel Djibloho became the most visible landmark and the only service genuinely up and running for visitors. Power came from the 120 MW Djibloho dam on the Wele River: without it the project would have been unviable.
The bet on education came in parallel: the Universidad Afro-Americana de África Central was created by decree on 2 December 2015 as the country's second public university, inaugurated its campus of glass towers on 2 August 2019 and opened to students on 27 January 2020. Together with the hotel, it is what gives the city something like a stable population.
In 2015 the settlement was formally constituted as an urban district within the province of Wele-Nzas; in 2017 a province of its own was created for it, Djibloho, the country's newest, and the city was officially renamed Ciudad de la Paz, replacing the local place name Oyala. In practice all three names coexist: official documents say Ciudad de la Paz, maps and bookings still say Djibloho or Oyala, and local people say Djibloho.
The transfer of the administration began gradually in early 2017, without much publicity, and for almost a decade the city lived in an odd situation: a capital's infrastructure, a capital's functions only halfway, and a population estimated in 2022 at about 2.000 people for a city designed for a hundred times more. Spotless boulevards with no cars, empty office towers and military guards around 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, capital of the Republic of Equatorial Guinea, displacing Malabo after almost two centuries of the capital being on the island. The decree gave the Presidency, the branches of the State, the constitutional bodies, government agencies and public companies one year to complete the move and actually set up there.
The government presented the decision as a decentralisation and regional rebalancing exercise. Critics see above all a prestige and security project paid for with oil revenue in a country constantly singled out for its opacity and its human rights record. Both readings describe the same place, and you need to keep both in mind to understand it.
While Mongomo and Djibloho grew by political decision, Ebebiyín grew through trade. The city sits at the point where three countries meet, countries that also share the same currency, the Central African CFA franc, pegged to the euro. On top of that historical advantage came a population explosion: from 3.540 inhabitants in 1983 —after fifteen years of independence and economic collapse— it rose to 19.515 in 2001 and to more than 60.700 today, multiplying its population seventeenfold in four decades and becoming the country's third city. The engine has a name and a place: the cross-border market of Akombang, where goods from Cameroon, Gabon and the interior of Río Muni converge.
That model has a structural weakness. The land borders of the mainland region are frequently closed and reopened, usually without notice, in connection with diplomatic tensions or security decisions; the latest closure reported by the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs began on 15 December 2025 and was announced for an indefinite period, with air and sea borders remaining open. For a city that lives off the crossing, every closure is a direct blow.
Political geography, on the other hand, shifted in the east's favour. With the capital established in Djibloho since January 2026, this corner of the mainland became the institutional centre of the country. And on 21 April 2026, Pope Leo XIV arrived in Equatorial Guinea on the last leg of an apostolic journey through Africa —the first papal visit in the country's history—; the following day he celebrated Mass at the basilica in Mongomo, blessed the foundation stone of the future cathedral of Ciudad de la Paz and called for spaces of freedom to be widened. In the afternoon he travelled to Bata, where he visited the prison and prayed at the memorial to the victims of the 2021 explosions.
In less than four months, the mainland east received the capital of the Republic and the first papal visit in its history. It had never been so close to the country's centre of gravity.
The history of Corisco is much older and much more important than its fifteen square kilometres suggest. Between roughly 50 BCE and 1400, the island was densely populated, in the midst of the African Iron Age. We know this by accident: in 2004, construction work on the airport uncovered archaeological remains.
Word reached the Centro Cultural de España in Bata in 2007. A first survey took place in 2009 and, in 2011, a full excavation campaign was led by Alfredo González-Ruibal, a researcher at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). Thirty sites were identified which, taken together, form the largest known necropolis of its period in Central Africa, with rich burials —grave goods of pottery, axes, necklaces, bracelets and currency ingots— and two distinct funerary rites, a sign of societies more complex than had been assumed.
The finding that changed the scientific picture was metallurgical: laboratory analysis showed that some of the objects thought to be iron were in fact steel. In other words, on this tiny island in the Gulf of Guinea there was a mastery of metallurgy far beyond what historians had attributed to the region.
The island's historical population is Benga, one of the Ndowe peoples of the coast, with their own kings, whom Europeans recognised as counterparts. That status was decisive: the treaties that brought the island into Spain's orbit were signed with Benga kings, starting with Bonkoro I in 1843. Corisco still holds the tomb of Santiago Uganda, the last Benga king, and the ruins of the colonial church next to the present-day one.
When Portuguese navigators reached Annobón, the island was uninhabited. There was no native population: its distance from the mainland —some 600 kilometres— and its size had kept it outside African coastal navigation. João de Santarém and Pêro Escobar sighted it on a 1 January, between 1473 and 1475 depending on the source, and that is why they called it Ano Bom.
Portugal gave it the role that would define its history: a stopover in the slave trade, a place to take on water and rest on the routes that carried enslaved people to Brazil and the Río de la Plata. The island received a forced population mainly from Angola and São Tomé, and from that origin the Annobonese people emerged: a creole community in the strict sense of the term, formed by Africans of different origins brought into contact in a new territory. Their language is fá d'Ambô, a Portuguese-based creole with a Bantu structure that is spoken nowhere else in the world and is still the island's everyday language, related to the creoles of São Tomé and Príncipe and Cape Verde.
Religion followed the same pattern of blending: the Catholicism brought by the Portuguese merged with ancestral spiritual practices, and Annobonese festivals —with drum, song and narrative dance— keep that double root. The main church is dedicated to Saint Anthony of Padua and gives its name to the capital, San Antonio de Palé.
The territory is tiny and vertical: some 17 square kilometres, six long by 3,2 at its widest, with sheer cliffs, black-sand beaches and Pico Quioveo, at 598 metres. Inland, one of the craters turned into a lagoon: Lake A Pot, about 600 by 400 metres, the landscape that defines the island. Isolation produced endemic species: 29 bird species recorded, several found only here —the Annobón paradise flycatcher, the Annobón scops owl, a white-eye of its own— and more than 208 vascular plants, around 15 % of them endemic.
In 1843, the mission of Juan José Lerena y Barry signed treaties with local chiefs around the gulf and established an effective Spanish presence. From this a peculiar colonial unit was born: Elobey, Annobón and Corisco, which existed between 1843 and 1926 and grouped together the gulf's smaller islands, barely 36 square kilometres in total. The nominal capital was Santa Isabel, where the governor general lived, and Annobón and Elobey Chico had lieutenant governors: an island of nineteen hectares had its own delegated authority.
In 1875 the garrison moved from Corisco to Elobey Chico, and between 1884 and 1926 the islet hosted the seat of the regional government, serving as the de facto capital of the mainland territory of Río Muni. The astonishing thing is not that it was a capital, but what fitted into 0,19 square kilometres: an administration building, a lighthouse, docks, a cistern, houses, a cemetery, a mission of the Claretian fathers and Spanish, Portuguese, English, French and German trading posts —most of them run by Hamburg merchants—. Through it passed the ivory, rubber, timber and palm oil that came down the Muni from the interior.
Around 1910 the whole colony counted some 2.950 people. And it left its best-known trace between 1903 and 1910, when it issued its own postage stamps: 72 issues identified in the Yvert catalogue, with a first 1903 series bearing the effigy of Alfonso XIII and values from a quarter of a céntimo up to 10 pesetas. Today they are rare and highly prized pieces, and for much of the philatelic world they are all that is known of these islands.
In 1926, the colonial government moved its seat to Cogo, on the mainland, and all the possessions were unified as Spanish Guinea. The effect on Elobey Chico was devastating: without the government, the trading posts left, the mission closed, families moved away and the tropical vegetation swallowed the houses, the warehouses, the lighthouse, the docks and even the cemetery. Today it is one of the most complete abandoned colonial sites in Atlantic Africa, and practically nobody knows it exists.
Independence in 1968 did not improve Annobón's situation: it made it worse. During the years of Macías Nguema's dictatorship and afterwards, the island became even more isolated, with erratic supplies and no basic services. In 1993, food shortages and forced labour led to a revolt by the population, which was put down by the military; that episode deeply marked the relationship between the island and the central government and remains very present in local memory. In 1988 an agreement to store toxic waste on the island had also been exposed, one of the cases that in the late eighties put the international spotlight on the dumping of industrial waste in Africa.
Demography tells the rest. The 2015 census recorded 5.232 inhabitants, but accounts from recent visitors speak of a much smaller actual population, around 2.000, because of sustained emigration to Malabo, Bata and abroad. The capital, San Antonio de Palé, has about 600 inhabitants; the other three villages —Aual or Santa Cruz, A'nganyi or San Pedro, and Mabana— are even smaller.
Recent years have been tense. In 2022, part of the population unilaterally proclaimed the "Republic of Annobón", a declaration with no international recognition but with a strong symbolic impact. In July 2024 the government cut telephone and internet coverage on the island, leaving it practically incommunicado. And in 2025, the independence campaigners formally asked to be linked to Argentina, invoking that eighteenth-century tie to the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata; their spokespeople made clear that they seek international recognition, not annexation.
The material conditions described by the few recent visitors are harsh: no running water pressure, electricity from diesel generators roughly from the afternoon until the early hours, no internet and supplies that depend on a monthly ship. Ceiba Intercontinental resumed flights between Malabo and Annobón in June 2025, initially weekly, with frequent cancellations. The Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs explicitly advises against tourist visits to the island.
For half a century, Corisco Bay was a disputed border. In 1972, Gabon occupied the islet of Mbañé and also claimed Cocoteros and Conga, three minuscule pieces of land in waters with oil potential: by 1981, consortia of Elf Aquitaine and Petrogab were already exploring the area. In 1974 the two countries signed a document in Bata known as the Bata Convention, which Gabon would later invoke as its title to the islands and whose validity Equatorial Guinea always rejected.
The case reached the International Court of Justice, which delivered its judgment on 19 May 2025 in the case "Land and Maritime Delimitation and Sovereignty over Islands (Gabon/Equatorial Guinea)". The Court concluded that the 1974 Bata Convention did not have the force of a treaty and that the applicable title was the 1900 Franco-Spanish convention, which had assigned the islands to Spain and, by succession, to Equatorial Guinea in 1968. The ruling thus confirmed Equatorial Guinea's sovereignty over Mbañé, Cocoteros and Conga and closed a dispute that had lasted five decades.
That history explains the military presence in the area, the frequent checks and the need to get permits to sail through the estuary and out to the islands: it is not an arbitrary bureaucratic formality, it is a border that was before the courts until very recently.
The smaller islands are also protected, on paper. Alongside the Reserva Natural del Estuario del Muni, the National System of Protected Areas included the Reserva Natural de las islas de Corisco, Elobeyes y Mbañé, with some 480 square kilometres covering Corisco (15 km²), Elobey Grande (2,27 km²), Elobey Chico (0,19 km²), Mbañé (0,3 km²) and more than 400 square kilometres of marine area.
On 10 October 2011, Corisco opened its international airport: a 3.115-metre concrete runway on an island of fifteen square kilometres and a few hundred inhabitants. The ceremony was attended by President Obiang and, as guest of honour, the then president of Gabon, Ali Bongo Ondimba. The project was part of an explicit plan to turn Corisco into a leading tourist destination and to connect the country's most isolated areas by air, following the same logic of oversized infrastructure that produced the Mengomeyén airport and the city of Djibloho.
Fifteen years later, the picture is mixed: the airport exists, but commercial operations are scarce and irregular and the large-scale resort complex never materialised. What did appear is small, hands-on tourism: local operators who put together two- and three-day trips from Bata, with a road transfer to Cabo San Juan, a two- to three-hour boat crossing to Corisco —on which dolphins are a common sight and, depending on the season, whales too—, a local guide, tourist and photography permits included, visits to the communities and days of beach and diving at Joko.
From Corisco you can hop over to the Elobey islands, if the sea and the tides allow. There is no museum setup there, no signage, no effective protection of the site and no staff on hand: no water, food, toilets, electricity or reliable phone coverage either. Only ruins wrapped in jungle, walls, the cistern and the tombs of a colonial capital that the vegetation swallowed in just a few years.
That format —small, community-based, dependent on the sea and on permits— is today the realistic way to get to know these islands. And it sums up well what they offer: the best beaches in the country, first-rate archaeological heritage still without any museum display, the memory of the Benga people and colonial ruins that almost nobody has seen. All of it without a single resort in sight, with everything good and uncomfortable that implies.
Hardly anything that happened to Equatorial Guinea happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
