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Fez after ten centuries of building, the earthen ksar at Ait Ben Haddou, and a country whose entire World Heritage record is architecture.

Carthage, the free-standing amphitheater at El Jem, and a whole island inscribed for the way people settled it: ten sites on a coast sold as a beach.

Cidade Velha was the first European town built in the tropics and a platform for the Atlantic trade in enslaved people. Creole culture began there.

The walled city of Harar and the Gedeo agroforestry landscape: two of Ethiopia's twelve World Heritage inscriptions, beyond the two everyone already knows.

The Osun sacred grove and the terraced hill settlement at Sukur: two World Heritage sites in Nigeria, one in the south west and one on the Cameroon border.

Aldabra, where a herbivore sits at the top of the food chain, and a palm forest on Praslin holding the largest seed in the plant kingdom.

Goree, which UNESCO calls both a reminder of human exploitation and a sanctuary for reconciliation, and a thousand stone circles along the Gambia.

The palaces of twelve Abomey kings, a savannah holding the only viable lion population in West Africa, and a masked society governed by women.

Koutammakou, the mud tower-houses of the Batammariba, is the only World Heritage site in Togo and it continues into Benin.

Five World Heritage sites, including the Shona capital a legend once credited to the Queen of Sheba, and half of a waterfall Zambia shares.

A fortified Portuguese trading post on the route to India, a wetland park shared with South Africa, and the music and masked dance of south and north.

One transnational property, the largest concentration of San rock paintings anywhere south of the Sahara, and a fish found in a single park.

No World Heritage site at all, one nomination pending since 2008, and the earliest known mining anywhere: ochre cut 42,000 years ago.

Three World Heritage sites in Cameroon: a rainforest reserve, a share of a park spanning three countries, and a dry-stone landscape with unknown builders.

Eighteen hundred rock carvings along a Bantu migration route, in a landscape where dense rainforest and relict savanna meet and neither wins.