Freetown

Freetown is the capital of Sierra Leone, a port city on a mountainous peninsula on the Atlantic coast of West Africa. Its harbor lies at the wide mouth of the Sierra Leone River, which takes its name from Serra Leoa, lion mountains, as Portuguese sailors called the hills behind it. Fourah Bay College, founded in 1827 by the Church Missionary Society, was the first Western-style university in West Africa.

The city was founded in 1792 by Black Loyalists who had sided with Britain in the American Revolution and came from Nova Scotia, led by John Clarkson of the Sierra Leone Company. Jamaican Maroons and settlers from many parts of West Africa joined them in the 19th century. The Krio people and their language, an English-based creole, grew from this mix of settlers and shaped the culture of the city. Freetown was the capital of the British colony of Sierra Leone and for a time the seat of the governor of British West Africa, and it became the capital of an independent Sierra Leone in the 1960s.

The Queen Elizabeth II Quay, the deep-water port of Freetown, handles containers and the imports of the country. Sierra Leone Brewery, based in the city, brews Star beer and Guinness stout. Fishing boats bring bonga fish and barracuda to the beaches of the peninsula, where they are smoked and sold in the city markets.

St. George's Cathedral, finished in the 1820s, is the oldest Anglican cathedral in West Africa. The Sierra Leone National Railway Museum keeps locomotives and coaches of the narrow-gauge railway that once ran inland, among them a coach built for a royal visit. Lumley Beach runs along the western shore of the city, lined with palm trees and restaurants. Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, in the protected rainforest on the hills above the city, cares for orphaned chimpanzees.