World Heritage Sites — Africa

World Heritage in Africa

Africa's 161 sites are the list's most under-visited, and the Committee knows it — the continent is the main target of its push to add sites from under-represented regions. North Africa holds the headline antiquities: the Pyramids and ancient Thebes in Egypt, Carthage and the medina of Tunis, Leptis Magna in Libya, the medinas of Fez and Marrakesh, the Roman city of Volubilis. Ethiopia's rock-hewn churches at Lalibela and the island churches of Lake Tana are the great cultural sites south of the Sahara, with Great Zimbabwe, Timbuktu, and the stone town of Zanzibar not far behind.

The natural sites are why most people come. The Serengeti, Ngorongoro, and Kilimanjaro in Tanzania; the Okavango Delta; Victoria Falls, shared by Zambia and Zimbabwe; the Virunga and the mountain gorillas; Namib Sand Sea; and the Cape Floral Region around Cape Town are all on the list, along with a dozen rainforest parks in the Congo basin that almost nobody reaches.

What's on this map

The map covers the whole continent plus the Indian Ocean islands — Madagascar, Mauritius, Seychelles, the Comoros (which got its first site in 2026), Réunion, and Kerguelen's French Austral Lands — and the remote Atlantic sites of Gough Island and Cabo Verde's Cidade Velha. Egypt is here, not with the Middle East. Click a badge or its pin to mark a site visited, again for want-to-go; marks count on the world overview too.

Sites in danger

Africa has more properties on the List of World Heritage in Danger than any other continent — around a third of the global danger list at the last count. Timbuktu and the Tomb of Askia in Mali, the Libyan sites, the Virunga and Garamba parks in the DRC, and the Selous in Tanzania are all flagged, for reasons ranging from armed conflict to poaching to dam construction. The flag doesn't mean you can't visit; Timbuktu and Leptis Magna have been off-limits for years, but the Congolese parks have reopened with escorted trips. The map marks in-danger sites in each pin's tooltip so you know what you're looking at.