Where to Stay in Buea, South-West Region

What is Buea known for?

Buea occupies the eastern slopes of Mount Cameroon, an active volcano whose bulk rises directly above the streets and gives the town a gradient that shows in almost every walk across it. The Southwest Region governs from here. Administration, the colonial buildings left from the years when Buea was the seat of German Cameroon, and the mountain itself are the three reasons visitors arrive.

What are the main landmarks in Buea?

The mountain is the landmark. Mount Cameroon stands directly above the town, an active volcano whose eastern slopes carry Buea itself and whose summit draws the climbers who make up much of the visitor traffic. Indoors there is one main draw.

The Musée de la Délégation régionale des Arts et de la Culture holds the regional arts and culture collection, and the scattered colonial buildings left from the German Cameroon years fill in the rest of a short sightseeing list.

What is the history of Buea?

Buea was a colonial capital before it was a regional one. At the beginning of the 20th century the town served as the seat of German Cameroon, an administrative role it held from a position high on the eastern slopes of Mount Cameroon rather than from the coast. The buildings survived.

Enough of that period's architecture still stands in Buea for the colonial layer to be read from the street rather than from a plaque, and it is the main reason the town appears on itineraries that otherwise skip Fako Division. Authority stayed on. After the German period, Buea kept an administrative function, and the modern arrangement makes it the capital of the Southwest Region within Fako Division.

Two government hotels grew out of that continuity. The Mountain Hotel and Parliamentarian Flats Hotel exist because officials needed somewhere to sleep, and both sit in The Government Residential Area, an address whose name states its purpose plainly. The record here is administrative rather than romantic.

What Buea preserves is the work of successive governments and the buildings they put up, while Mount Cameroon, which decided where all of it was placed, has outlasted every one of them.

Where is Buea?

Everything tilts. Buea lies on the eastern slopes of Mount Cameroon, so the town is built across a gradient, and the difference between its upper and lower streets is measured in climb rather than in blocks. Fako Division surrounds it.

The wider setting is Coastal Cameroon, with the volcano on one side and the lowlands running down towards the sea on the other, which gives Buea a position that is neither properly highland nor properly coastal.

What is the climate of Buea?

Mount Cameroon writes the weather. Buea sits high enough on the volcano's eastern slopes to run cooler than the lowlands below it, and cloud that piles against the mountain can shut the summit out of view for days at a stretch. The band is tropical.

Wet and dry stretches replace any notion of four seasons, and the practical question for a visitor is whether the climb up Mount Cameroon will be walked in cloud or in clear air.

How do you get to Buea?

There is no way in but the road. Buea is reached overland from the rest of Fako Division and the wider Southwest Region, and the final approach climbs steadily as it leaves the lowlands for the volcano's flank. The climb starts before the town does.

Arrival is easier to judge by height gained than by distance covered, because the last stretch onto the eastern slopes of Mount Cameroon takes longer than a map suggests.