☰Sainte-Marie Cathedral

The mission-era Catholic church on the western bank is one of the few colonial buildings of any size in Lambarene. The Holy Ghost Fathers arrived in the late 1880s, well before Schweitzer, and their mission station eventually became the cathedral of the Diocese of Mouila. The architecture is modest — a long, white-washed building with a tall corrugated roof — but the setting above the river is fine and Sunday services are lively, with the kind of full-voiced singing that makes the heat worth bearing.