The hook
One of the largest churches in the world, a colossal domed basilica modelled on St Peter's in Rome, rising improbably out of a small, half-empty planned city in the middle of West Africa.
01Why it's worth it
The Basilica of Our Lady of Peace is one of the most extraordinary and surreal buildings in Africa. When Ivory Coast's founding president moved the capital to his home village of Yamoussoukro, he crowned the new city with this: an immense Catholic basilica, its dome deliberately echoing (and, in some measures, exceeding) St Peter's in the Vatican, set amid vast marble plazas and colonnades, with room for many thousands of worshippers under acres of stained glass, in a country that is far from majority Catholic. Its scale is genuinely staggering, and the sheer improbability of encountering it in a quiet, spread-out African city, its grand avenues often nearly deserted, gives it a dreamlike, monument-to-one-man's-vision quality. The enormous cost, in a developing nation, has long drawn criticism, which is part of its complicated story. Whatever one makes of it, it is an unforgettable sight, and it anchors a visit to the planned capital, a curiosity of empty grandeur, while the real energy of the country lies in Abidjan on the coast.
02How to experience it
Tour the basilica and its plazas to grasp the scale, and reflect on the story and controversy behind it. The rest of Yamoussoukro, with its wide, quiet boulevards and the presidential palace's sacred crocodile lake, adds to the curious atmosphere. It is an easy stop between Abidjan and the interior.