Important warning: this guide describes Goma as a reference, but the city is not a viable tourist destination today. Goma is in the east of the DR Congo, a region in armed conflict, and in January 2025 it was taken by the M23 rebel group after days of fighting that killed hundreds. Its airport was closed and many governments advise against all travel to the area. Before even considering a trip, you must check the official safety advice. With that warning up front, getting to know Goma helps you understand eastern Congo, its beauty and its tragedy.
In peacetime, Goma is a city in a stunning, privileged setting: it sits on the shores of Lake Kivu, one of Africa's Great Lakes, with blue water on one side and the smoking outline of the Nyiragongo volcano on the other. For years it was the gateway to Virunga National Park —to the mountain gorillas and the climb up the volcano—, a lively border trading hub and the base of countless humanitarian organisations working in the east of the country. Its daily life, its music and its energy stand in contrast to the harshness of its surroundings.
But Goma is also a city marked by tragedy: it survived the 2002 eruption of Nyiragongo, which buried whole neighbourhoods under lava, and it has been at the epicentre of the wars that have ravaged eastern Congo since the 1990s. The M23 takeover in 2025 was the latest and most devastating chapter in that story. This guide explains what Goma is, why it matters and what makes it unique, always with the warning that visiting depends on a peace that does not exist today.
Goma grew as a border town on the shores of Lake Kivu during the Belgian colonial period, and its population soared from 1994, when the Rwandan genocide sent more than a million refugees into its surroundings. Since then it has been an epicentre of the wars in eastern Congo. In 2002, the eruption of the Nyiragongo volcano destroyed much of the city. In January 2025 it was taken by the M23 rebel group, in the worst crisis of its recent history, with its airport closed and the city under occupation. The full story is on our dedicated page.
Read the full history ↓The mountainous east is home to the mountain gorillas of Virunga, the lava lake of Nyiragongo and the Great Lakes. It is also an area of active armed conflict, so always check the official travel advice.
Read the history of The east: the Kivus, the volcanoes and the Great Lakes →A local guide tells you in half an hour what no sign at the site will ever explain. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have 7 activities in Kigali. And there are free tours here: you book without paying and tip the guide whatever you think at the end, so trying one costs you nothing. Have a look below: tap any of them to see them all.
They depart from Kigali, 90 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Goma was born and grew up as a border city at the northern tip of Lake Kivu, in one of the most beautiful and fertile regions of central Africa. The area, with a climate made mild by its altitude and rich volcanic soils, had long been home to farming and herding peoples. During the Belgian colonial period, Goma developed as a small administrative and trading centre, effectively twinned with the neighbouring town of Gisenyi, across the border in what was then Ruanda-Urundi under Belgian administration.
Its position was strategic: beside a large navigable lake, on the border with Rwanda, at the foot of a chain of volcanoes and at the gateway to what would become Albert National Park (today Virunga). Lake Kivu offered transport and fishing; the volcanic land, good harvests; and the border, trade. Goma gradually established itself as the hub of the Kivu region, one of the most populated and productive in eastern Congo.
After Congo's independence in 1960, Goma remained a mid-sized city, the capital of its region, and relatively prosperous given the country's difficulties. Nothing at the time suggested that, in the decades that followed, it would become the epicentre of some of the greatest humanitarian and military tragedies on the planet, or that its name would travel around the world linked to refugees, volcanoes and war.
The turning point in Goma's history came in 1994. That year, the Rwandan genocide — in which around 800,000 people were killed, most of them Tutsi — ended with the victory of the Rwandan Patriotic Front. As they retreated, more than a million Hutu refugees, including civilians but also those responsible for the genocide and armed militias, crossed the border and crowded into enormous camps around Goma.
The sudden, massive arrival of such a multitude completely overwhelmed the city and the region. Gigantic camps sprang up in catastrophic sanitary conditions; a cholera epidemic killed tens of thousands of people within weeks, in one of the worst humanitarian emergencies in living memory. Overnight, Goma became the centre of a colossal international aid operation and a symbol of suffering in the Great Lakes.
Those camps also turned into bases for armed militias that used eastern Congo as their rear guard, sowing the seeds of the conflicts to come. The presence of these armed groups on its territory was the trigger that Rwanda and its allies would cite to intervene militarily in Congo, dragging the region into a spiral of wars that continues to this day. Goma was left, for good, in the eye of the storm.
From the late 1990s, Goma lived at the centre of the wars that ravaged eastern Congo. The First Congo War (1996-1997) brought Laurent-Désiré Kabila to power; the Second (1998-2003), often called the 'African World War' because of the number of countries involved, caused millions of deaths, most of them from hunger and disease. The east, with its mineral wealth (gold, coltan, cassiterite), became a chessboard of plunder fought over by armies, neighbouring governments and dozens of armed groups.
Goma changed hands several times and suffered occupations, fighting and recurring crises. Even after the peace agreements of the early 2000s, violence never fully stopped in Kivu: successive rebellions emerged, and the city remained the humanitarian capital of a chronic emergency, with camps for internally displaced people on its outskirts and a huge presence of UN peacekeepers (the MONUSCO mission) and aid organisations.
In 2012, an early rebel movement called M23 briefly took Goma, before being defeated in 2013. But the root causes of the conflict — ethnic disputes, control of minerals, the tension between Congo and Rwanda — were never resolved. The calm in Goma was always fragile and temporary, a truce between storms, while the city kept growing with the constant arrival of people fleeing violence in the countryside.
As if war were not enough, Goma has had to live with the permanent threat of the Nyiragongo volcano, which rises a few kilometres to the north. On 17 January 2002, the volcano erupted and a flow of fluid lava ran down into the city, cut through its centre, destroyed thousands of buildings and shops, covered part of the airport runway and reached the shore of Lake Kivu. Some 250,000 people had to flee, many crossing temporarily into Rwanda.
Goma rebuilt itself on top of the lava, with the astonishing resilience that defines it: entire neighbourhoods were literally built on the solidified black rock. But the threat remained. On 22 May 2021, Nyiragongo erupted again, this time with almost no warning, and the lava swept through parts of the north of the city, killed dozens of people and once more triggered a mass evacuation amid fears of new flows and a possible release of gases from Lake Kivu.
These volcanic disasters, layered on top of chronic war, make Goma one of the cities facing the greatest accumulation of threats on the planet. And yet its population has never stopped growing or rebuilding, holding on to the fertility of its land, the beauty of its lake and a vitality that survives every tragedy. Few cities in the world pack so much beauty and so much danger into one place.
The most recent and devastating chapter in Goma's history opened in late 2024 and early 2025. A powerful new offensive by the M23 rebel group — backed, according to numerous UN and government reports, by Rwanda — advanced across North Kivu and, at the end of January 2025, moved on Goma. After nearly two days of fierce fighting against the Congolese army, in which hundreds of people died and many more were wounded, M23 took control of the city.
Goma airport, the scene of intense clashes, was badly damaged — its control tower and facilities destroyed — and put out of service. It remained closed throughout 2025, and its reopening became a political tug-of-war: M23 rejected the Congolese government's efforts to reopen it, and the city was cut off by air, which greatly worsened the humanitarian crisis in a region with millions of displaced people who depended on the aid arriving through that airport.
Goma came under M23 administration, in a tense and precarious situation that accounts gathered by international media described as one of fear and uncertainty. The international community warned of the risk of a wider regional war. For travellers, the conclusion is unambiguous: Goma is today a city in an active conflict zone, advised against by governments, and its future as a destination depends entirely on reaching a peace that, at the time of writing this guide, has still not come. Knowing its history is a way of paying tribute to the resilience of its people and understanding the tragedy of eastern Congo.
