Equatorial Guinea: the oil-rich island most travellers can't place

Equatorial Guinea is the African country almost nobody can place on a map, and the only one where Spanish is the working language. Landing on Bioko, its volcanic island core in the Gulf of Guinea, feels less like West Africa and more like a Spanish overseas territory that drifted south.

Oil money runs through everything, and it is concentrated and conspicuous. The president's son, who serves as vice president, is known abroad mostly for a supercar collection lavish enough to have made international headlines, on an island small enough that you would never get a Bugatti out of second gear.

It only cracked open to tourism recently, and it shows. To reach the Ureka waterfall you need a military permit and a local chief's blessing. The drive up Pico Basile, the island's high volcano, is brutally steep with no switchbacks, on the logic that the church at the top is visited about once a year and nobody saw the point in building them. Away from the paperwork, though, the island unwinds completely: the beaches are easygoing, the people warm, and a long conversation with a local is the one thing here that needs no permit at all. Sipopo, the showpiece beach near Malabo, we abandoned on arrival: loud, littered, and nowhere near the coast the island is clearly capable of.

Come for the sheer oddity of it: a tiny, Spanish-speaking, oil-soaked island that almost no traveller ever reaches. Just plan around the permits, and keep your beach expectations for somewhere else.