Africa Geography

North Africa's geography is dominated by the Sahara, the world's largest hot desert, which stretches across Algeria and reaches into Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia — bordered by the Atlas Mountains in Morocco and Algeria, and by the fertile Nile Valley and Delta in Egypt, whose river has sustained continuous settlement for millennia.

East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania) sits along the Great Rift Valley, a dramatic geological fracture running the length of the region, home to Mount Kilimanjaro (Africa's highest peak) and vast savanna plains that support some of the world's largest remaining populations of large mammals.

South-central and southern Africa (Malawi, Zambia, South Africa) range from Lake Malawi, one of the world's largest and deepest freshwater lakes, to the Zambezi River and Victoria Falls on the Zambia border, to South Africa's own strikingly varied terrain — a Mediterranean-climate southwest, savanna in the north and east, and a long Atlantic and Indian Ocean coastline. Mauritius and Seychelles are volcanic and coral island nations in the Indian Ocean, ringed by coral reefs and, in Seychelles' case, some of the world's oldest granite islands.