Littoral, Benin — Towns & Travel Guide

What is Littoral known for?

Littoral covers 79 square kilometres, less than any other department of Benin, and the capital it contains is Cotonou, the largest city in the country. That pairing is unusual. The smallest of the twelve departments holds the biggest city, a result of the 1999 division that carved Littoral out of Atlantique Department and left it with little more than Cotonou to administer.

Where is Littoral?

Littoral is the smallest department in Benin. Its 79 square kilometres, 31 square miles, make it the least extensive of the twelve, and almost all of that ground answers to Cotonou, the capital it holds. Size is the defining number.

Every other department of Benin is larger, and the gap is wide enough that Littoral reads on a map as a small block set into the territory of Atlantique Department, from which it was cut. The department is tropical ground north of the equator. Boundaries here are recent.

The department was created in 1999 out of territories that had belonged to Atlantique Department, so the line between Littoral and Atlantique Department is a recent administrative decision rather than an old one. Twelve departments share Benin. Littoral is the twelfth by area and the first by the size of the city inside it, which is the whole of what distinguishes its ground from the departments around it.

Cotonou is the reference point. Distances inside Littoral are measured against the city, because 79 square kilometres leaves no second centre for them to be measured against.

What is Littoral like?

Cotonou carries all of it. A department of 79 square kilometres with the largest city in Benin inside it has no rural counterweight, which means the public life of Littoral is the public life of a single city and nothing else. That is rare among the twelve.

The other departments of Benin spread across far more ground, and Littoral's identity comes instead from concentration, from being the country's smallest unit wrapped around its biggest city. Cotonou is where every visitor's impression of Littoral is formed, whether or not the department's name is on the sign. French runs the paperwork.

Administration in Littoral is conducted in French, the language attached to the department in the register, and it is the language a visitor meets at every office in Cotonou. The name is French too. Littoral was set down under that word when the department was separated from Atlantique Department in 1999, and the label has stayed attached to the smallest of Benin's twelve units ever since.

Its institutions belong to Cotonou. Whatever the department runs, it runs from the city, because 79 square kilometres leaves nowhere else for those functions to sit.

What is the history of Littoral?

Littoral dates from 1999. The department was created that year by splitting up territories of Atlantique Department, an act that produced the smallest of the twelve departments of Benin and gave it Cotonou as its capital. Before that there was Atlantique.

The ground Littoral occupies belonged to Atlantique Department until the division, so the department's recorded history begins with an administrative decision rather than with a settlement.

What is the climate of Littoral?

Littoral sits in the tropical band. Its position north of the equator gives the department a year without a cold season, and across 79 square kilometres there is no room for one part to differ from another. Cotonou's weather is the department's.

Conditions read for the city hold for Littoral entirely, which is not the case in the larger departments of Benin that surround it.

How do you get to Littoral?

Everything arrives at Cotonou. Benin's largest city is the capital of Littoral and the only destination the department contains, so reaching Littoral and reaching Cotonou are the same act. The department ends quickly.

At 79 square kilometres a route crosses out of Littoral and into Atlantique Department, the unit it was separated from in 1999, within a short run of the city.