Western

The coast between the port cities and the far west is a run of small fishing settlements with beaches that get progressively better, and a handful of them have grown a low-key traveller scene without losing what they were. Busua is the most established: a broad sandy bay with a gentle break that has made it the centre of Ghana's small surf culture, with board hire and lessons available and a genuinely welcoming beginner's wave. It is the easiest place in the country to spend a week doing very little. A short walk or paddle around the headland, Butre sits at a river mouth backed by mangroves and is quieter again; further west, Akwidaa and the villages beyond it have long empty beaches and almost no infrastructure. The pattern across all of them is the same and worth knowing: accommodation is small-scale and locally owned, the fish comes off the boats in the morning, the electricity is not always on, and the appeal is precisely that none of it has been developed. Swim with sense — the surf here has rips, and there are no lifeguards anywhere on this coast; the health and safety guide covers what that actually means in the water.

Inland from the far western coast, the village of Nzulezo stands entirely on stilts over Lake Tadane — a single raised walkway of planks with houses either side, a school, a church, and no ground at all. It is reached by paddled canoe through an hour of reed channels and swamp forest from the village of Beyin, and the journey is half the experience: quiet, low in the water, with kingfishers going up ahead of the boat. The village has been there for a very long time and its origin is explained by an oral tradition the guides will tell you. It is a working community rather than an exhibit, which is worth remembering with a camera — the people whose front doorstep you are walking along live there, visits are organised through the community, and asking before photographing is the whole of the etiquette. Go early for the birdlife and the light.

Ghana's rainforest, in most visitors' minds, is Kakum — which is real forest, accessible and rightly popular. Ankasa, in the far south-west near the Ivorian border, is a different order of thing: the wettest and most biodiverse protected area in the country, a block of largely primary forest with an extraordinary plant list, forest elephants, several primate species and a bird list that brings serious birders across the world. It receives a tiny fraction of Kakum's visitors, and the reason is straightforward — it is a long way from anywhere, the accommodation is basic, and the experience is walking in dense wet forest rather than crossing a canopy walkway. There is no substitute for a guide here, both for safety and because the forest gives up almost nothing to an untrained eye. Come prepared for rain in any month, leeches after it, and the possibility of seeing very little on a given day — which is the honest bargain of primary forest anywhere, and why the days you do see something are worth the rest.

Cape Three Points is the southernmost land in Ghana and the closest point on the African mainland to the notional zero-zero intersection out in the Atlantic — a fact that draws a certain kind of traveller a long way down a poor road to stand next to a lighthouse. The cape itself is a scattering of palms, a small reserve of coastal forest behind it, and a genuine sense of the end of the road. The wider coast is one of Ghana's more important turtle nesting grounds: leatherbacks and olive ridleys come ashore between roughly November and March, and several villages run night watches with local guides, which are organised on the spot rather than booked ahead and are conducted with proper distance from the animals. Take the guidance about lights seriously, because it is the thing that actually matters to the turtles. Inland from the coast, the region's other economy is visible in the gold-mining towns and the rubber and oil-palm plantations that run for miles along the roads north.

Four European forts stand along this coast, and unlike the great castles further east they receive almost nobody. Axim's Fort St Anthony is the oldest and one of the oldest European buildings anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa — Portuguese, from the early sixteenth century, Dutch for two hundred years after that — set on a rock above the town with the fishing beach on one side and open Atlantic on the other. Dixcove's Fort Metal Cross was built by the English at the end of the seventeenth century and stands whitewashed and square on the hill above a working fishing bay; the view down over the canoes justifies the climb even if the gate happens to be shut. Behind Butre, a short steep path through the village leads up to the ruin of Fort Batenstein, Dutch, where there is nothing left but walls, a view over the river mouth and quiet. West again at Princes Town is the odd one: Fort Gross Friedrichsburg, built in the 1680s for a Brandenburg-Prussian trading company — a European presence on this coast that even well-read visitors do not expect — later Dutch, and now a whitewashed block above the sea at the end of a rough road. What visiting them involves is the same in each case: they are looked after by caretakers rather than run as museums, someone will unlock a door and show you round if anyone is about, a small donation is the convention, and the condition ranges from properly restored to bare walls. The setting is as much the point as the fabric — all four sit exactly where you would put a building if you wanted to watch the sea, above towns that have been fishing the same water for far longer than the forts have stood.