Guinea Highlands
plateau in Liberia

The Guinea Highlands is a densely forested mountainous plateau extending from central Guinea through northern Sierra Leone and Liberia to western Ivory Coast. The highlands include a number of mountains, ranges and plateaus, including the Fouta Djallon highlands in central Guinea, the Loma Mountains in Sierra Leone, the Simandou and Kourandou massifs in southeastern Guinea, the Nimba Range at the border of Guinea, Liberia, and Ivory Coast, and the Monts du Toura in western Ivory Coast.
Geography
In Guinea they are known as Dorsale Guinéenne. The highest peak in the region is Mount Bintumani in Sierra Leone, at 1,945 metres (6,381 ft). Other peaks include Sankan Biriwa (1,850 metres (6,070 ft)) in Sierra Leone and Mount Richard-Molard (Mount Nimba) (1,752 metres (5,748 ft)) on the border of Guinea and Ivory Coast. The highlands mostly lie between 300 and 500 metres (980 and 1,640 ft) above sea level.
The Guinea Highlands are the source of many of West Africa's rivers, including the Niger River, West Africa's longest river, the Senegal and Gambia rivers, and the rivers of Sierra Leone, Liberia, Maritime Guinea, and western Ivory Coast.
Geology
Geologically the composition of the sediments in the highlands are the same as in Upper Guinea and include granites, schists, and quartzites.
Ecology
The Guinea Highlands form the transition between the Western Guinean lowland forests, moist tropical rainforests that lie to the south between the Guinea Highlands and the Atlantic Ocean, and the Guinean forest-savanna mosaic to the north.
The Guinean montane forests ecoregion covers the portion of the highlands above 600 meters elevation.
“Guinea Highlands” enters the record as plateau in Liberia. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Guinea, Highlands and plateau can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5616476. Authority coordinates are 9.500, -10.000. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Guinea Highlands” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.