Africa > Liberia > Buchanan
Buchanan is the third largest city in Liberia, the capital of Grand Bassa County, and one of the more relaxed coastal stops in the country. It sits on Waterhouse Bay, about 130 km southeast of Monrovia along a road that has been rebuilt in recent years and is now mostly tarred — the trip takes around three hours in a shared taxi.
The city was founded by Bassa people and later expanded by Americo-Liberian settlers who named it after Thomas Buchanan, the first governor of the Liberian commonwealth (and cousin of US president James Buchanan). Its modern shape, though, was set by iron. From the early 1960s the Swedish-American consortium LAMCO ran one of the largest iron-ore mining operations in West Africa from a mountain inland at Yekepa, in the Sanniquellie area near the Guinean border, shipping the ore by railway to Buchanan's deep-water Port of Buchanan. LAMCO built planned neighbourhoods, a hospital, and Lamco Airport. The mine closed in 1989, just before the civil war, and Buchanan has spent the decades since growing back around what's left.
Today the appeal is straightforward: a long, mostly empty Atlantic beach, a working African port worth a look, and a slower pace than Monrovia. The Buchanan Beach stretches for kilometres with hardly anyone on it. Across the Saint John River sits Edina, one of the oldest settler towns in the country, founded in 1832 and still home to a handful of nineteenth-century buildings. The nearby fishing village of Fanti Town is where Ghanaian Fanti migrant fishermen settled generations ago and still bring in the daily catch.
Buchanan is not a tourist town in any developed sense — there are a few guesthouses, a couple of restaurants, and that is about it. But for travelers wanting a quiet day or two on the coast within easy reach of Monrovia, or as a stop on the way south to Greenville and Sapo, it does the job well.