Gabon's highland interior city — gorilla research station, UNESCO biosphere reserve, and the Lopé gateway
Franceville sits in Gabon's southeastern interior at 350m, the country's fourth-largest city and the gateway to the Lopé National Park — a UNESCO World Heritage Site protecting lowland gorillas, forest elephants, chimpanzees, and one of the most biodiverse rainforest systems in Central Africa. The CIRMF (Centre International de Recherches Médicales de Franceville) was a pioneering primate research centre and is still one of Africa's leading biomedical research facilities. The Trans-Gabon Railway connects Franceville to Libreville via Lopé — one of the great African railway journeys through un…
Franceville was founded in 1880 by Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza as a free village for former enslaved people from the Ogooué region — an unusually idealistic colonial founding for its era. The Trans-Gabon Railway was built by Gabon's first president Omar Bongo between 1974 and 1986, connecting Franceville to the coast through what had previously been impenetrable rainforest. The city grew substantially during the uranium mining boom at nearby Moanda in the 1970s–80s, which coincided with the discovery of the natural nuclear fission reactor at Oklo — a 1.7 billion-year-old naturally occurring nu…