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Accra, the capital of Ghana

Updated: 2010-10-22 13:51

Accra is the capital and largest city in Ghana with the population of the city proper estimated at 1,963,264 as of 2009. Accra also doubles as the capital of the Greater Accra Region and of the Accra Metropolitan District with which it is coterminous.

Accra is also the anchor of a substantially larger metropolitan area called the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area and includes eight districts. It is home to about 4 million people, making it the largest metropolitan conglomeration in the country by population.

As a primate city, Accra is the administrative, communications, and economic centre of the country.

Originally built around a port, Accra stretches along the Atlantic Coast and north into the interior. Serving as the nation’s capital, then the Gold Coast, from 1877 its architecture ranges from large and elegant nineteenth century colonial buildings to skyscrapers and apartment blocks made of concrete, glass and steel in the 1970s, reflecting its transition from a 19th century suburb of Victoriaborg to the modern metropolis it is today.

Spreading along the Atlantic coast, the city is well endowed with luxury as well as great value hotels, excellent restaurants and night clubs. A range of absorbing museums and fine public monuments, modern business and commercial areas, as well as busy markets and tree-lined residential suburbs, is ready to be explored. Since the early 1990s a number of new buildings have been built, including the multi-storey Novotel hotel which is French-owned. There is also an impressive National Theater that was built with help from the Chinese.

The center of Accra contains the main banks, the large department stores, the Cocoa Marketing board headquarters and a whole area known as The Ministries, where the government administration is concentrated. Economic activities in Accra are financial, agriculture, fishing, and manufacturing processed food, lumber and plywood, textiles, clothing and chemicals.

Source: wikipedia