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Guinea Highlands

plateau in Liberia

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJan 18, 2026
Entity authorityQ5616476
Source-derived summary

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.

Editorial summary

“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.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current 260-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Guinea, Highlands and plateau.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Guinea Highlands” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Guinea, Highlands and plateau provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

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.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  2. Expand the search: follow Guinea Highlands primary sources, Guinea Highlands archive and Guinea research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

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.