Africa Geography & Climate

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.

North Africa has a Mediterranean climate along the coast (mild, wet winters and hot, dry summers) transitioning to true desert conditions inland across Algeria and Egypt, where daytime heat can be extreme and temperature swings between day and night are dramatic.

East Africa's climate is shaped less by four seasons than by two annual rainy periods (roughly March-May and October-December in Kenya and Tanzania) separated by drier stretches — elevation matters enormously here too, with highland areas considerably cooler than the savanna floor.

South-central and southern Africa follow a Southern Hemisphere calendar (summer December-February, winter June-August), with Malawi and Zambia's wet season roughly November to April and a long dry winter the rest of the year; South Africa's own climate varies by region, from Mediterranean in the southwest to subtropical along the eastern coast.

Mauritius and Seychelles are tropical year-round, warm and humid with a wetter, hotter period (roughly November to April, Mauritius's own cyclone season) and a cooler, drier one (May to October).