Mount Cameroon

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The Mount Cameroon (also Fako, formerly Albert tip;. Engl Mount Cameroon, French Mont Cameroun ) is an active volcano in western Cameroon. It is 4095 m high and thus the highest mountain in West Africa. It is located in the region ( province until 2008 ) South-West, in the English-speaking part of the country, close to the coast just to the diffraction of the Gulf of Guinea and thus in the range of the approximate transition between West and Central Africa.

The volcanic massif was formed by the so-called Cameroon line, a hot spot that produced the islands of São Tomé, Príncipe, and Bioko and Annobón ( on the mainland) the rest of the mountainous regions of western Cameroon with the local crater lakes. The older and now extinct volcano cone of Etinde (also called Little Mount Cameroon ) reaches a height of 1715 m. When Mount Cameroon is probably the world's the oldest still active volcano.

The historically witnessed outbreaks of Fako occurred in 1650, 1807, 1825, 1838, 1852, 1865, 1866, 1871, 1909, 1922, 1925, 1954, 1959, 1982, 1999 and 2000. Eruptions went here from south-southwest to the north- northeast, according to the longitudinal axis of the volcanic massif. The volcanic activity gradually over time runs from west to east ahead.

At the foot of the massif prevail (especially the exceptionally fertile by the volcanic soils of tropical conditions ) favorable conditions for the plantations and so the lowland rain forests are almost all replaced by oil palm and rubber trees. The slopes of the Fako are still largely covered with mountain rain forest, interrupted by fire clearance for the cultivation of banana, cocoyam and Ndole ( Vernonia amygdalina ). At about 2200 m, the forest is abruptly replaced by savanna, which eventually turns into alpine mats. The south-western slopes of the massif between Limbe and Idenau count with over 11,000 mm annual rainfall of the wettest places on earth. To the Summit to show up then grasses and later small crags with ash gray green fields and crumbled lava. At the summit the only form lichen vegetation; occasionally occurs in this amount to a blanket of snow.

Very likely was the Carthaginian navigator Hanno around 470 BC witnessed an outbreak of Fako; in his travel report appears a burning mountain, which lit up the night sky and fire flows generated into the sea down. Hanno called him as before the Greeks " Theon Ochema " ( German " Chariot of the Gods " ), which even the Roman encyclopedist Pliny the Elder described as the largest then known volcano in the middle of the southern boundary of Africa.

The first ascent of the Fako proven by Europeans succeeded in 1861 the British Sir Richard Francis Burton and the German botanist Gustav Mann. After Gustav man is still the man - Spring, with about 2400 m asl highest source of the mountain named. Mary Kingsley in 1895 was the first woman to reach the summit of Fako. Today, the summit is climbed each year of 1000-2000 tourists with moderate effort, there is one supported by the German GIZ Ökotourismusanbieter.

On the plateau at about 1,000 m altitude is the provincial capital of Buea.