The Most Beautiful Villages in Africa
7 places in 6 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful villages in Africa are Aït Benhaddou (Morocco), Ghadames (Libya) and Chefchaouen (Morocco). The list covers 7 villages in 6 countries. Morocco has the most, with 2. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Africa's most beautiful villages are shaped by climate and by the materials closest to hand. In the Sahara and its margins, builders used earth and palm wood to make thick walls and tight, shaded lanes that keep out heat and sand. Along the Mediterranean, whitewash and blue paint reflect the sun. South of the desert, communities built over water or painted their walls as a form of collective art. The result is a range of settlement forms found nowhere else in the world.
Aït Benhaddou, a fortified village of earthen houses and towers on a hillside in southern Morocco, once guarded a caravan route across the Atlas and has been a World Heritage Site since 1987. Ghadames in Libya, an oasis town known as the pearl of the desert, is built as a single structure of covered passageways, with rooftop paths that were reserved for women. Chefchaouen in Morocco's Rif mountains is famous for its lanes washed in shades of blue, while Sidi Bou Said in Tunisia combines white walls and blue doors on a cliff above the Gulf of Tunis.
Farther south, Ganvie stands entirely on stilts in Lake Nokoué in Benin, its inhabitants moving between houses by canoe. At the Royal Court of Tiébélé in Burkina Faso, Kassena women decorate the earthen houses with geometric patterns in red, black and white. In Cape Verde, Fontainhas on Santo Antão perches its houses along a narrow ridge above steep green terraces.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Aït Benhaddou | Most beautiful village | Morocco | |
| 2 | Ghadames | Most beautiful village | Libya | |
| 3 | Chefchaouen | Most beautiful village | Morocco | |
| 4 | Sidi Bou Said | Most beautiful village | Tunisia | |
| 5 | Ganvie | Most beautiful village | Benin | |
| 6 | Royal Court of Tiébélé | Most beautiful village | Burkina Faso | |
| 7 | Fontainhas | Most beautiful village | Cape Verde |
01 Aït Benhaddou
Morocco31.050° N 7.133° W
Image by sosinda from Pixabay Its location explains its existence. The ksar sits on the old caravan route between the Sahara and Marrakech, which crossed the Atlas by the Tizi n'Tichka pass, and the site has been fortified since at least the 11th century. The buildings visible today are younger - none is thought to predate the 17th century - because earth architecture must be continually repaired and rebuilt. Walls are of rammed earth, adobe and clay brick framed with timber; in the taller kasbahs the lower storeys are rammed earth and the upper ones lighter adobe, to ease the load on the walls. Within the walls are houses, several kasbahs, a mosque and a caravanserai, and outside them Muslim and Jewish cemeteries.
Did you know? According to local tradition, it is named after Amghar Ben Haddou, a chief said to have ruled the site in Almoravid times, in the 11th century.
02 Ghadames
Libya · 0 km from Ghadames30.133° N 9.500° E
No machine-readable author provided. Teogomez assumed (based on copyright claims). · Public domain The design answers the climate, where July highs average around 41 degrees. The houses are built of mud brick, lime and palm trunks and divide their functions by height: stores at ground level, family rooms above them overhanging the alleys, and open terraces on top that were traditionally reserved for women. The old town was split among seven clans, each with its own district and its own square for festivals. Settlement around the spring may go back to the fourth millennium BC, and local legend explains its origin: the thirsty mare of a desert rider is said to have pawed the ground until water burst out, and the town was built around this Spring of the Mare.
Did you know? Rain is almost absent here: Ghadames receives only about 73 millimetres of precipitation a year.
03 Chefchaouen
Morocco35.169° N 5.268° W
Image by eyw2008 from Pixabay The town began in 1471 as a small fortress founded by Ali ibn Rashid al-Alami to hold the region against Portuguese raids on northern Morocco. Over the following century and a half it filled with refugees from al-Andalus, Muslims, Moriscos and Sephardic Jews, who built their quarters on the mountainside in a style close to that of Granada, with arched brick passages, courtyard houses planted with orange and lemon trees, and a network of water channels. Jews once made up about a third of the population, and their cemetery and the remains of the mellah survive.
Did you know? The French explorer Charles de Foucauld slipped into the town in 1883 disguised as a Jewish rabbi and stayed for only about an hour.
04 Sidi Bou Said
Tunisia · 12.6 km from Aryanah36.870° N 10.341° E
Image by aliciacharlotte from Pixabay The place began as a religious retreat. In the early thirteenth century the Sufi teacher Abu Said al-Baji settled on what was then called Jabal el-Menar, the lighthouse hill, and taught there until his death in 1231; his sanctuary gave the village its name. Centuries later wealthy families from Tunis built summer residences on the slope, and in the early twentieth century painters arrived — Paul Klee, August Macke and Louis Moilliet travelled through Tunisia together in April 1914 — Klee glimpsed Sidi Bou Said from the deck of his ship on arrival — and the light of this coast entered their work. Writers followed, among them André Gide and Michel Foucault.
Did you know? Until 1825 the village was closed to non-Muslims; after that, visitors including Chateaubriand, Flaubert, Lamartine, Colette and Simone de Beauvoir came here.
05 Ganvie
Ganvié
Benin · 11.7 km from Cotonou6.468° N 2.391° E
Manu25 at French Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0 The village grew out of flight. In the era of the Atlantic slave trade, the Tofinu people took refuge in the marshes and shallows of the lake, where the warriors who raided the mainland for captives to sell to European traders could not follow them; sources place the founding between the 16th and the 18th centuries. Tradition explains the name in the Fon language as meaning that the people were saved here, and holds that the gods protected them on the water. Ganvie is still home to its own traditional monarchy, like many communities in Benin.
Did you know? Lake Nokoué, which holds the village, is about 20 kilometres wide and 11 kilometres long, covering some 4,900 hectares.
06 Royal Court of Tiébélé
Cour royale de Tiébélé
Burkina Faso · 20.9 km from Pô11.090° N 0.962° W
Alexander Leisser · CC BY-SA 4.0 According to tradition, the court was founded in the 16th century by a group who came south from Loumbila, north-east of Ouagadougou, under a leader named Patyringomie, after a quarrel over succession. They settled on the hill of Tchibeli, which gave Tiébélé its name, and drove out the earlier inhabitants of Kollo. Patyringomie's son Buinkiété is said to have founded the kingdom after obtaining a powerful protective fetish, and the various groups living here merged over time into the Kassena people.
Did you know? Just inside the low doorway of a round hut, a small wall must be stepped over, which lets those inside see who is coming before the visitor is fully in.
07 Fontainhas
Fontainhas (Santo Antão)
Cape Verde · 35.4 km from Mindelo17.188° N 25.104° W
Kogo · GFDL The settlement lies near the rocky north coast of the island, in the municipality of Ribeira Grande, at about 158 metres above sea level. The slopes around it are cut into narrow agricultural terraces, built by hand so that crops could be grown on the fertile volcanic soil of ground far too steep to farm otherwise. Fontainhas also takes in the smaller hamlets of Corvo and Forminguinhas, about a kilometre to the west, where the ravine narrows into a canyon.
Did you know? In 2024 the government of Cape Verde classified the village as National Cultural and Natural Heritage, citing its landscape and its testimony to local traditions.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful villages in Africa?
- On our list, Aït Benhaddou (Morocco) ranks first, followed by Ghadames (Libya) and Chefchaouen (Morocco).
- Which country has the most villages in Africa?
- In our collection, the most come from Morocco (2), Benin (1) and Burkina Faso (1).
- Why is Chefchaouen painted blue?
- No single explanation is certain. The most common one links the blue to the Jewish community that settled in the town, for whom the colour had religious meaning; other accounts point to cooling, keeping insects away or simply attracting visitors.
- Why was Ganvie built on a lake?
- According to tradition, the Tofinu people settled on Lake Nokoué in the 17th or 18th century to escape slave raiders, who were forbidden by their beliefs from entering the water. The village grew into one of the largest lake settlements in Africa.
- Who paints the houses of Tiébélé?
- The houses are painted by Kassena women, who renew the designs collectively using earth, chalk and other natural pigments. The patterns are symbolic and are passed down between generations.
- How many villages are on this list in Africa?
- The list covers 7 villages in 6 countries. Morocco has the most, with 2.