Despite natural advantages, initial Portuguese efforts in 1507 to establish a sugarcane plantation and town near what is now Concepción on Fernando Pó failed due to Bubi hostility and fever.

[27] The main island's rainy climate, extreme humidity and temperature swings took a major toll on European settlers from the beginning, and it would be centuries before attempts restarted.

[29] Unwilling to invest heavily in the development of Fernando Pó, from 1827 to 1843, the Spanish leased a base at Malabo on Bioko to the United Kingdom which it had sought as part of its efforts to suppress the transatlantic slave trade.

Spain's decision to abolish slavery in 1817 at British insistence damaged the colony's perceived value to the authorities and so leasing naval bases was an effective revenue earner from an otherwise unprofitable possession.

Although a few of the Fernandinos were Catholic and Spanish-speaking, about nine-tenths of them were Protestant and English-speaking on the eve of the First World War, and pidgin English was the lingua franca of the island.

Madrid only partly backed the explorations of men like Manuel Iradier who had signed treaties in the interior as far as Gabon and Cameroon, leaving much of the land out of "effective occupation" as demanded by the terms of the 1885 Berlin Conference.

[36] The eventual treaty of Paris in 1900 left Spain with the continental enclave of Río Muni, only 26,000 km2 out of the 300,000km2 stretching east to the Ubangi river which the Spaniards had initially claimed.

The economy was based on large cacao and coffee plantations and logging concessions and the workforce was mostly immigrant contract labour from Liberia, Nigeria, and Cameroun.

The gross national product per capita in 1965 was $466, which was the highest in black Africa; the Spanish constructed an international airport at Santa Isabel, a television station and increased the literacy rate to 89%.

Two General Assembly resolutions were passed in 1965 ordering Spain to grant independence to the colony, and in 1966, a UN Commission toured the country before recommending the same thing.

At the conference, the leading Fang figure, the later first president Francisco Macías Nguema, gave a controversial speech in which he claimed that Adolf Hitler had "saved Africa".

Macías resolved to travel to the UN to bolster international awareness of the issue, and his firebrand speeches in New York contributed to Spain naming a date for both independence and general elections.

During the Nigerian Civil War, Fernando Pó was inhabited by many Biafra-supporting Ibo migrant workers and many refugees from the breakaway state fled to the island.

[49] After the Public Prosecutor complained about "excesses and maltreatment" by government officials, Macías had 150 alleged coup-plotters executed in a purge on Christmas Eve 1969, all of whom were political opponents.

In spite of his condemnation of Marxism, which he deemed "neo-colonialist", Equatorial Guinea maintained special relations with communist states, notably China, Cuba, East Germany and the USSR.

[54] Apart from allegedly committing genocide against the ethnic minority Bubi people, Macias Nguema ordered the deaths of thousands of suspected opponents, closed down churches and presided over the economy's collapse as skilled citizens and foreigners fled the country.

The 1982 constitution of Equatorial Guinea gives him extensive powers, including naming and dismissing members of the cabinet, making laws by decree, dissolving the Chamber of Representatives, negotiating and ratifying treaties and serving as commander in chief of the armed forces.

[citation needed] According to Human Rights Watch, the dictatorship of President Obiang used an oil boom to entrench and enrich itself further at the expense of the country's people.

[72] Nevertheless, the Amnesty International report released in June 2005 on the ensuing trial of those allegedly involved highlighted the prosecution's failure to produce conclusive evidence that a coup attempt had actually taken place.

In 2006, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice hailed Obiang as a "good friend" despite repeated criticism of his human rights and civil liberties record.

[85] Interior minister Clemente Engonga refused to authorise the protest on the grounds that it could "destabilize" the country and CPDS decided to go forward, claiming constitutional right.

On the night of 24 June, the CPDS headquarters in Malabo were surrounded by heavily armed police officers to keep those inside from leaving and thus effectively blocking the protest.

[86] In 2016, Obiang was reelected for an additional seven-year term in an election that, according to Freedom House, was plagued by police violence, detentions and torture against opposition factions.

[89] Freedom House, a pro-democracy and human rights NGO, described Obiang as one of the world's "most kleptocratic living autocrats", and complained about the US government welcoming his administration and buying oil from it.

[96] Equatorial Guinea is home to gorillas, chimpanzees, various monkeys, leopards, buffalo, antelope, elephants, hippopotamuses, crocodiles, and various snakes, including pythons.

Spanish remained as its lone official language until 1998, when French was added as its second one, as it had previously joined the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa (CEMAC), whose founding members are French-speaking nations, two of them (Cameroon and Gabon) surrounding its continental region.

Indigenous languages (some of them creoles) include Fang, Bube, Benga, Ndowe, Balengue, Bujeba, Bissio, Gumu, Igbo, Pichinglis, Fa d'Ambô and the nearly extinct Baseke.

[129] Due to historical and cultural ties, in 2010, the legislature amended Article 4 of the Constitution of Equatorial Guinea to establish Portuguese as an official language of the Republic.

Some of the motivations for Equatorial Guinea's pursuit of membership in the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP) included access to several professional and academic exchange programmes and facilitated cross-border circulation of citizens.

[151][152] Tourist attractions are the colonial quarter in Malabo, the southern part of the island Bioko where you can hike to the Iladyi cascades and to remote beaches to watch nesting turtles, Bata with its shoreline Paseo Maritimo and the tower of liberty, Mongomo with its basilica (the second largest Catholic church in Africa) and the new planned and built capital Ciudad de la Paz.