Salonga

Declared in 1970, it is the largest protected rainforest area on the whole African continent, in the very heart of the Congo Basin, the second largest continuous rainforest on the planet after Amazonia. It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1984 and protects the bonobo, our closest living relative alongside the common chimpanzee, which exists in the wild solely in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in no other country in the world. Its extreme remoteness — no roads in, reachable only by river after several days of travel — keeps it among the least studied and least visited protected areas on the planet, though decades of political instability and armed conflict in the region have made effective patrolling against poaching and illegal mining seriously difficult in its remotest corners.