It only has one UNESCO World Heritage Site – but it’s a goodun’
The Lopé-Okanda Ecosystem and Relict Cultural Landscape, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is one of the things about Gabon you should know. It demonstrates an interface between dense and well-conserved tropical rainforest and relict savannah environments with a wide range of species and habitats, including endangered large mammals. The site depicts ecological and biological processes as they relate to species and habitat adaptation to post-glacial climatic changes.
The Lopé-Okanda Ecosystem and Relict Cultural Landscape contains evidence of the successive passages of different peoples who have left extensive and comparatively well-preserved remains of habitation around hilltops, caves and shelters, evidence of iron-working and a remarkable collection of some 1,800 petroglyphs (rock carvings). The property’s collection of Neolithic and Iron Age sites, together with the rock art found there, reflects a major migration route of Bantu and other peoples from West Africa along the River Ogooué valley to the north of the dense evergreen Congo forests and to central east and southern Africa, that has shaped the development of the whole of sub-Saharan Africa.
