Mont Cameroun Hot Springs

Mont Cameroun Hot Springs draws sulphurous geothermal water from the volcanic system of Mount Cameroun in the Buea area of the Southwest region, where the most active volcano in West Africa at 4,040 metres and its most recent eruption in 2000 produces hot springs and fumaroles on its flanks in a landscape of equatorial montane forest, lava flows, and agricultural villages of the Bakweri people for whom the mountain, known as Fako, is a sacred ancestor embodiment and the centre of a rich oral tradition of volcanic mythology. The ascent of Mount Cameroun, achievable in two days by fit trekkers and regularly undertaken by local runners in the Race of Hope, one of Africa's oldest mountain races first held in 1973, passes through five distinct vegetation zones from the coastal rainforest at sea level through montane forest, sub-alpine grassland, and alpine moorland to the bare lava summit, a botanical and climatic transect compressed into a vertical kilometre that has no equivalent in West African geography. The volcanic hot springs of Buea, used by Bakweri communities for therapeutic and ritual purposes in a tradition predating European contact, flow in a setting where the steam plumes of the most active mountain in continental Africa are visible on clear days, giving the act of thermal bathing in the shadow of Mount Cameroun a geological immediacy found at very few thermal destinations in the world.