Journal

An earth wall with a fourteen kilometer radius, around a market and a palace that are still working. Kano is all but essential travel.

A town lived on top of an isolated rock hill for centuries, and its palace, its court and its belfry are still up there today.

A century ago every Yoruba town had a sacred grove. This is the largest one left, and UNESCO calls it probably the last in Yoruba culture.

A hilltop kingdom with terraced fields and the remains of an iron industry. The FCDO advises against all travel to the state it stands in.

A Hausa kingdom of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, nine kilometers across, now walls and wells in the scrub. Sokoto is all but essential travel.

We publish no month-by-month table, because we could not source one. Here is what the year is organized around instead, island by island.

The first Creole society formed on these islands, at a port built for the slave trade. The music that came out of it is a music about leaving.

Cape Verde has exactly one UNESCO-inscribed tradition, and it is a form of music about leaving. That turns out not to be a coincidence at all.

Mindelo throws the country's best-known carnival. This page does not tell you when, because nobody we could reach publishes the date.

Cachupa is the national dish and it is built from what the islands could actually grow. It takes a long time on purpose.

People live on the floor of an active volcano with an eight kilometer caldera. In 2014 it erupted, and they are still there.

The first European colonial town in the tropics, a platform for the Atlantic slave trade, and where the first Creole society formed. All one place.