Burkina Faso

FESPACO (Festival panafricain du cinéma et de la télévision de Ouagadougou), founded in 1969 and held every two years in late February or early March, is the most important film festival in Africa. The Étalon de Yennenga (Stallion of Yennenga) is the festival's top award and a defining honour in African cinema. The festival has launched the careers of Idrissa Ouedraogo, Gaston Kaboré, Souleymane Cissé and a generation of African directors. Ouagadougou's cinemas, screening venues and adjoining markets transform the city for the festival fortnight.

Tiébélé, in the south near the Ghanaian border, is the seat of the Kassena chieftaincy and home to one of West Africa's most distinctive architectural traditions: the cour royale (royal compound) of mud-brick houses entirely covered in geometric murals — chevrons, zigzags, lozenges, animal motifs — painted by hand by women using natural pigments of black manganese, white kaolin and red laterite. Each house, built and re-painted across generations, makes the village a living open-air gallery.

Bobo-Dioulasso, the country's second city, was a major caravan stop on the trans-Saharan trade routes. Its Grande Mosquée (1880), built entirely of mud-brick in the Sudano-Sahelian style with wooden poles bristling from its walls, ranks alongside the Great Mosques of Djenné and Larabanga. The Kibidwé old quarter behind the mosque preserves traditional Bobo and Dioula compounds; the Bobo-Dioulasso railway station (1934) is a striking piece of French colonial architecture; and the night-time live-music scene at venues like Les Bambous remains the most renowned in the country.

The Ruins of Loropéni (UNESCO World Heritage, inscribed 2009) in the southwest, near the Ghanaian and Ivorian borders, are the best-preserved of around a hundred laterite-stone fortifications across this region — dating from the eleventh century at the latest, linked to the Lohron and then Koulango peoples and the Akan-controlled trans-Saharan gold trade. The massive walls of the surviving complex, set in dense forest, are Burkina Faso's first UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Sindou Peaks in the Cascades region of the southwest are a fantastical natural skyline — eroded sandstone needles and pinnacles rising abruptly from flat land, offering one of the most dramatic landscapes in West Africa. Nearby, the Banfora cascades (Karfiguéla falls), Lake Tengréla with its hippos, and the Domes de Fabédougou — vast eroded sandstone formations — make Banfora the natural-landscape capital of the country.

The Mossi people make up about 50% of Burkina Faso's population, and the Mossi kingdoms — founded in the fifteenth century — remain a living institution. The Moogho Naaba (Emperor of the Mossi) holds court in Ouagadougou; every Friday morning, the half-hour Naaba Friday ceremony in front of his palace re-enacts a tradition more than 500 years old. The National Museum of Music and the Manéga Museum preserve royal regalia, masks, instruments and the long history of the kingdoms.

The W-Arly-Pendjari complex (UNESCO World Heritage), shared between Burkina Faso, Niger and Benin, is one of West Africa's last large intact savanna ecosystems — elephants, lions, hippos, buffaloes, roan antelope and over 350 bird species across the W National Park (Burkina Faso's portion in the southeast) and the contiguous Arly and Pendjari parks. Confirm current access with your tour operator and consult your foreign ministry's advisory for the eastern region before planning a visit.