In Africa, there are just so many wonderful sites for only one list to encompass all. I will try as much as possible to list out the best of the best
PYRAMIDS OF GIZA
We sometimes overlook how extraordinary the Pyramids of Giza are because the image of them is commonplace today. It is the works of thousands and thousands of laborers, the Pyramids and the Sphinx at Giza is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and they were known to the ancients as a Wonder of the World. The Giza Complex is located outside Cairo on the fringes of the Libyan Desert. it was built to house the dead pharaohs and all the items they would need to rule the afterlife.
SIDI BOU SAID
Sidi Bou Said is a pretty village in Tunisia on the Mediterranean coast that has caught the fancy of great painters and writers for over a century. Before the French artist Baron Rodolphe D’Erlanger instigated a color scheme of whitewash and light blue that now covers the whole village, it was just a local religious site looking out onto the azure waters of the ocean. The buildings are famous too for their great studded doors, with crescent patterns on many it was just a local religious site looking out onto the azure waters of the ocean. Matisse, Klee, and Auguste Macke all came here to paint, and Andre Gide and Simone de Beauvoir came to write.
TABLE MONTAIN
Table Mountain looms over Cape Town at the southern tip of the continent at the Cape of Good Hope. Along with the peaks of Signal Hill, Devil’s Peak, and Lion’s Head, it forms a huge natural amphitheater in which the Dutch settlers of the 17th century first established what would become Cape Town. With its flat top well over a thousand meters above sea level at its highest point at Maclear’s Beacon, Table Mountain is often obscured by clouds from ground level. But you can take the famous cable car up to the top.
LAKE MALAWI
It forms a spectacular natural site. With its clear waters, unspoiled beaches and the backdrop of mountain on all sides. When David Livingstone came here he coined the name ‘Lake of Stars’ due to the lamps of the fishermen he saw out on the lake in the darkness. The Lake is also home to many rare fish types of exceptional scientific value, along with the crocodiles and hippos that skulk along the shores.
GONDAR
Gondar, often referred to as the ‘Camelot of Ethiopia’, is known for its massive historical remains. The Emperor Fasilides and his successors built the picturesque royal enclosure known as the Fasil Ghebbi in the 17th century. It’s a place full of palaces, libraries, banqueting halls and castles for the Ethiopian aristocracy, built under the influence of the European Baroque brought here by Portuguese missionaries.
RWENZORI MOUNTAINS
The Rwenzori Mountains are found in western Uganda and part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Often overlooked, they boast a climate that combines the Alpine with the tropical. You’ll find heather along with rare plants like lobelias and spectacular mountain peaks topped with snow, and glaciers, waterfalls and lakes. Africa’s third highest mountain, Mount Stanley, is in the Rwenzori range, as is the highest and most permanent source of the Nile. The first European to set eyes on the mountains was Henry Morton Stanley in 1889.
SAHARA DUNES
The Sahara stretches from Egypt in the east, all the way across North Africa to Morocco in the west. It’s at its most spectacular and romantic in Morocco, close to the border with Algeria, where you’ll find the Erg Chebbi, a sand sea made up of undulating dunes formed by the blowing of the winds, which has been much photographed and filmed. The ideal base to explore the sands is at the village of Merzouga from which groups head out on the backs of camels to see the unspoiled desert sands.