About Burundi
A beautiful country in the heart of Africa
Located in the middle of the African continent, in the Great Lakes region, Burundi is shaped like a heart, and has a surface of 27,834 km2. Except for Rwanda which has only 26,000 km2, Burundi’s neighbouring countries are very big, among which Tanzania in the South and in the East has a surface of 941,550 km2 and Congo in the West with 2,345,410 km2.
Burundi, often called “the country of one thousand hills” or “the Switzerland of Africa”, is a country of plateaux and hills, of which the great majority are around 1,500m high. The highest peak is 2,670m whereas the lowest level is in the vicinity of the capital, Bujumbura, near Lake Tanganyika, at a sea level of 800m. The Lake, full of fish, is the second deepest in the world, after Lake Baikal in the former USSR.
Burundi is part of the “Rift Valleys”, the great breaking gaps associated with volcanic activity which are located along East Africa from the Red Sea to Lake Malawi through Ethiopia.
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