Lope

Declared in 2002 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007 — the first Gabonese site to be so recognised — Lopé preserves geological and botanical evidence of relict savannahs that survived within the equatorial forest through the last ice age, when a drier climate temporarily broke up the continuous rainforest of Central Africa and left pockets of savannah that persist to this day deep inside the forest. It also holds the largest documented concentration of mandrills in the world, in troops of several hundred animals.