The River Volta

Volta River - Ghana's most important drainage system, stretching around Tamale in the north to the Volta mouth at Ada east of Accra. Much of it is now submerged in the 8,500 km sq. Lake Volta, the world's largest artificial body water. The Basin is flanked by mountains to the east and west. The eastern highlands, part of the Togo-Atakora range that stretches through Benin, reach altitudes in excess of 900m near the Ghana-Togo border.

The Volta has been called "a sovereign river". A thousand miles long from where its main tributary, the Black Volta rises in Burkina Faso until it joins the Atlantic swells in the Gulf Of Guinea, it draws its waters from a land area of some 150,000 square miles and from a host of tributaries - some small, other such as the Black Volta, large rivers in their own right.

During the course of this long journey to the sea, the river passes through many kinds of landscape. The Black Volta, for instance, enters Ghana in the North-West in a setting open parkland and continues, a natural boundary with the Ivory Coast, until it swerves east to run now through a country of orchard bush, a low-lying land contrast to the Northern uplands with their Savannah vegetation.

Similarly, with that other among many tributaries, the White Volta. This too, rises beyond Ghana's northern boarder and also leaves the uplands behind - but to curve west in this case until it meets the Black Volta.