Welcome to my gallery of the Volta Region
If you continue east after the mouth of the Volta and leave the Greater Accra region, you will come to the region that owes its name to the great river – the Volta Region. Until its division in 2018, it stretched 400 kilometres up the east bank of the river – today, the upper half forms the newly created Oti region. While the Volta forms the natural eastern border of the regions, the state border with Togo is a complete artifact. As a result, this corner is historically, culturally and linguistically closer to Togo than the Ghana west of the Voltas, which is not least related to the Ewe ethnic group, which has its largest settlement area here across the state border. Until 1918, these regions were not part of the then existing British colony of the Gold Coast, but belonged together with today's Togo to German Togoland. After the German defeat in the First World War, their annexed territory was divided between the British and the French. Through this history, the Volta region had clear peculiarities even before its division, and there were and still are political forces that demand greater autonomy on this basis.If one still looks at the two regions together, the elongated form shows that a very wide spectrum of landscape diversity can be found here in one room. From the southern coast with the Volta Delta and the magnificent palm-filled sandy beaches to the tropical mountain worlds with their waterfalls to the northern grassland and savannah plains. This is always accompanied by the banks of the Volta, which runs through the country as a lifeline and has a massive impact on climate, vegetation and infrastructure. Due to its natural conditions, the region is not particularly populous compared to the other regions in Ghana's south. There are just 2.5 million people in both politically separate regions. Even the capital Ho has a manageable 100,000 inhabitants and can be symbolic of the rather quieter character of this beautiful corner. In contrast to Accra, it is therefore more of a region of deceleration, which, despite its natural beauty, does not save with cultural diversity.