Cocobeach is a town in northwestern
Gabon
Gabon (; ; snq, Ngabu), officially the Gabonese Republic (french: République gabonaise), is a country on the west coast of Central Africa. Located on the equator, it is bordered by Equatorial Guinea to the northwest, Cameroon to the north ...
, lying on the south bank of the
Muni River
The Muni is an estuary of several rivers of Equatorial Guinea and Gabon.''A directory of African wetlands'' By R. H. Hughes, J. S. Hughes, p. 501 (on Google Books Part of its length form part of the border with Gabon. It is from this estuary tha ...
. It is the capital of the
Noya Department
Noya is a department of Estuaire Province in western Gabon. The capital lies at Cocobeach
Cocobeach is a town in northwestern Gabon, lying on the south bank of the Muni River. It is the capital of the Noya Department. It has a beach and is t ...
. It has a
beach
A beach is a landform alongside a body of water which consists of loose particles. The particles composing a beach are typically made from rock, such as sand, gravel, shingle, pebbles, etc., or biological sources, such as mollusc shel ...
and is the main
border town
A border town is a town or city close to the boundary between two countries, states, or regions. Usually the term implies that the nearness to the border is one of the things the place is most famous for. With close proximities to a different coun ...
for
Equatorial Guinea
Equatorial Guinea ( es, Guinea Ecuatorial; french: Guinée équatoriale; pt, Guiné Equatorial), officially the Republic of Equatorial Guinea ( es, link=no, República de Guinea Ecuatorial, french: link=no, République de Guinée équatoria ...
,
ferries
A ferry is a ship, watercraft or amphibious vehicle used to carry passengers, and sometimes vehicles and cargo, across a body of water. A passenger ferry with many stops, such as in Venice, Italy, is sometimes called a water bus or water tax ...
sailing to
Cogo
CoGo Bike Share is a public bicycle sharing system serving Columbus, Ohio and its suburbs. The service is operated by the bikeshare company Motivate (part of Lyft, Inc.) It was created in July 2013 with 300 bikes and 30 docking stations, since ...
across the river and the border.
The town is very small, containing just a fishing village, a small market and a number of adjacent
beach
A beach is a landform alongside a body of water which consists of loose particles. The particles composing a beach are typically made from rock, such as sand, gravel, shingle, pebbles, etc., or biological sources, such as mollusc shel ...
es. It is one of the major travel destinations in the region owing to the
Crystal Mountains inland from the town, which contain some of the oldest rainforests in Gabon. These were able to largely escape the drying effect of glacial periods of the
Quaternary
The Quaternary ( ) is the current and most recent of the three periods of the Cenozoic Era in the geologic time scale of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS). It follows the Neogene Period and spans from 2.58 million years ...
due to the persistent fog from the
Benguela Current providing moisture during the dry season.
Climate
Like a good portion of Gabon, Cocobeach has a
tropical monsoon climate
An area of tropical monsoon climate (occasionally known as a sub-equatorial, tropical wet climate or a tropical monsoon and trade-wind littoral climate) is a tropical climate sub-type that corresponds to the Köppen climate classification category ...
(
Köppen Köppen is a German surname. Notable people with the surname include:
* Bernd Köppen (born 1951), German pianist and composer
* Carl Köppen (1833-1907), German military advisor in Meiji era Japan
* Edlef Köppen (1893–1939), German author and ...
''Am'') with a long wet season from September or October to May and a short dry season due to the cold, foggy Beneguela current during the southern hemisphere winter.
Compared to more southerly parts of Gabon, Cocobeach is somewhat wetter, with around ten to fifteen percent more rainfall than Libreville and a
dry season
The dry season is a yearly period of low rainfall, especially in the tropics. The weather in the tropics is dominated by the tropical rain belt, which moves from the northern to the southern tropics and back over the course of the year. The te ...
usually several weeks shorter. Although no reliable climate data exist, it is often thought that annual rainfall further north may reach as high as .
References
{{Authority control
Populated places in Estuaire Province
Equatorial Guinea–Gabon border crossings