Guinea-Bissau

The capital and largest city of Guinea-Bissau, a humid Atlantic port where West African market energy meets Portuguese colonial streets and a riverfront that has defined the city's commerce for centuries.

A small island and former capital of Portuguese Guinea where the administrative centre of Bissau was established in 1895 and maintained until 1941, now a quiet island with remarkable Portuguese colonial architecture slowly being reclaimed by tropical forest.

The most visited island in the Bijagós Archipelago, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, where pirogues line a curved waterfront and the surrounding islands shelter hippos, sea turtles and traditional Bijagó villages that maintain one of West Africa's most intact matrilineal cultures.

A vast estuary system at the mouth of the Cacheu River in northern Guinea-Bissau where the river widens into a network of tidal channels lined with dense mangrove forest, offering some of West Africa's most impressive mangrove paddling and birdwatching.

The principal city of eastern Guinea-Bissau at the foot of the Futa Djallon foothills, a region of rolling laterite plateau, stone-built villages and a market that draws merchants from across the Upper Guinea region, offering a landscape and atmosphere sharply different from the coastal south.

The westernmost group of the Bijagós Archipelago, a national park and UNESCO World Heritage Site protecting one of West Africa's last viable populations of the common hippo, as well as pristine savanna, tidal flats and villages where the Orango kingdom maintains traditional governance.