Parc National du Banco

The forest that became the Parc National du Banco was set aside as a protected forestry station in 1926, one of the earliest conservation measures taken anywhere in French West Africa, at a time when much of the surrounding coastal forest was being cleared for timber extraction and cash-crop agriculture. Its colonial-era arboretum, planted within the reserve, was used to trial timber species for commercial forestry, and remnants of those experimental plantings survive within the park today alongside the surrounding primary forest. The reserve was upgraded to full national park status in 1953, formalising its protection as Abidjan's urban population began to grow rapidly in the years leading up to independence. What makes the Banco unusual among West African protected areas is that the city grew up around it rather than through it: successive waves of urban expansion in Abobo, Adjamé, Yopougon and Attécoubé enclosed the forest on all sides, leaving roughly 3,440 hectares of tropical forest, including a 600-hectare core of primary, largely undisturbed forest, intact inside the boundaries of a metropolis of several million people, a rare case of a substantial tract of untouched rainforest surviving inside a major African city. The Banco river running through the park has been used by fanico, traditional laundrymen, for generations, and their washing and drying operations along the riverbanks remain a visible continuation of a trade that predates the park's formal protection. The park today combines its conservation role, protecting endemic flora and fauna within an urban enclave, with continued traditional use of its waterways, making it as much a living cultural site as a nature reserve.