The African capital that speaks Spanish — colonial plazas, oil wealth and gorilla forest nearby
Malabo is the capital of Equatorial Guinea, the only Spanish-speaking country in Africa — a fact that produces a disorienting city where cathedral bells ring over a Central African rainforest island, Spanish colonial plazas anchor the city centre, and oil money has built modern hotels on an island that 60 years ago had no paved road. Malabo sits on Bioko Island in the Gulf of Guinea, with views across the water to Mount Cameroon on clear days. The island's interior hides one of Africa's most biodiverse cloud forests, home to drill monkeys and endemic birds that exist nowhere else on earth.
Bioko Island (then Fernando Poo) was claimed by Portugal in 1472 and passed to Spain in 1778, becoming a base for British anti-slavery patrols in the early 19th century — the British presence explains why many older Biokoan families have English surnames alongside their Spanish ones. The island and mainland territories became independent as Equatorial Guinea in 1968 under Francisco Macías Nguema, who turned the country into one of Africa's most brutal dictatorships, killing or exiling a third of the population before being overthrown by his nephew Teodoro Obiang Nguema in 1979. Oil discovered…