Three days in Accra

The rule that shapes every Accra itinerary

Plan your days around traffic and heat, in that order, and the city becomes easy. Ignore them and you will spend three days in the back of a car watching a junction.

Accra's rush hours run roughly from half past six to half past nine in the morning and from four until eight in the evening, and they are not a mild inconvenience. A journey from Spintex to Jamestown that takes forty minutes at ten in the morning can take two hours at half past five. The Tetteh Quarshie interchange, Kwame Nkrumah Circle, the Ring Road and the stretch of the N1 past Achimota are the places where time disappears.

Heat is the second constraint. Between about midday and three the sun is punishing and the humidity makes walking around an open site like Black Star Square genuinely unpleasant. Ghanaians structure the day accordingly, and you should too.

So the shape of every day below is the same: out early, something indoors or shaded in the middle, out again from four, eat late. That single pattern is worth more than any list of attractions.

Where to base yourself

Stay in Osu, Cantonments, Airport Residential or out at Labadi, because all four put the central sites within twenty to forty minutes outside rush hour.

Osu is the most convenient for a short trip. Oxford Street and the streets around it hold restaurants, bars, pharmacies, supermarkets and money-change, and you can walk to dinner rather than order a car for every meal. It is also noisy, and the noise runs late.

Cantonments and Airport Residential are quieter and greener, with embassies, larger houses and better hotels, at the cost of being more dependent on a car. Labadi and La put you on the coast with sea air and a shorter run to the airport, but a longer run into the old city.

Two areas to think twice about for three days. Spintex is well supplied but the single road in and out is one of the worst traffic corridors in Accra. East Legon is pleasant and increasingly where the city's money lives, but it is a long way from Jamestown and everything you came to see. If you are arriving late and leaving early, staying within twenty minutes of Kotoka has a real value of its own.

Getting around the city

Ride-hailing apps are the default for visitors in Accra, and they work well, but a hired car with a driver is better value the moment you are visiting three places in a day.

Bolt and Uber both operate across the city and fares are modest by international standards. The friction is in the pickup: drivers call rather than message, landmarks matter more than pins, and describing where you are standing in terms of a junction or a named building saves five minutes of circling. Keep data on your phone and a local number if you can.

Ordinary taxis are everywhere and have no meters, so agree the fare before you get in. That negotiation is normal and nobody is offended by it. Trotros — the shared minibuses that move most of Accra — are cheap, fast on their fixed routes and confusing if you do not know the hand signals and the route calls. They are worth doing once, with someone who knows the system, rather than relying on.

A driver for the day removes all of this. He waits while you are inside a museum, keeps your water cold in the car, knows which approach to Makola avoids the worst of the crush, and can change the order of the day when a road closes for a funeral. For a family or anyone over three or four stops, it costs less than the sum of the trips.

Day one: Jamestown and the old city

Give the first morning to Jamestown, on foot, with a local guide, starting no later than eight o'clock.

Jamestown is the oldest surviving part of Accra, a dense fishing quarter wrapped around the harbour below Ussher Fort. You walk between low houses and courtyards, past boat builders and fishmongers, through the smell of smoked fish and salt and diesel, with children everywhere and boxing gyms tucked into concrete yards — Bukom, the neighbourhood next door, has produced a remarkable number of Ghana's champions. The lighthouse above the shore gives you the view of the whole harbour, and climbing it is the single best thing you can do in your first hour in the city.

Go with a guide rather than alone, and not for safety reasons. Jamestown is a working, crowded, lived-in neighbourhood, and wandering through it with a camera and no introduction is intrusive in a way people notice and resent. A guide from the community makes it a visit rather than a stare, and gets permission for the photographs you do want. Ask before you photograph anyone; sometimes the answer is no.

Ussher Fort and the Brazil House sit nearby and are worth an hour between them. Afterwards, retreat: the middle of the day is for lunch somewhere with a fan and a long sit. Come out again at four for the Arts Centre near the seafront, which is a hard sell in places but the right place to buy kente, carvings, beads and drums if you haggle cheerfully and slowly.

Day two: Independence Square, Nkrumah and Makola

Day two is Ghana's national story in the morning and Accra's commercial heart at midday, and it works best in that order.

Start at Black Star Square, which most people still call Independence Square. It is vast, open, concrete and almost entirely unshaded, which is why you want to be there by half past eight. The Independence Arch and the Black Star Gate face the sea, the parade stands rise on either side, and standing in the middle of it on an empty weekday morning gives you a much clearer sense of what independence in 1957 was staged to mean than any museum caption could.

From there it is a short drive to the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park and Mausoleum on the old polo ground where Nkrumah declared independence. The grounds are shaded and calm, the mausoleum and the fountains are striking, and the museum beneath holds his books, his desk, photographs of him with Nasser and Castro and the rest, and a frank account of the coup that removed him. Allow ninety minutes. It is the site most visitors regret rushing.

Then Makola. The main market sprawls north of the Kwame Nkrumah Avenue area and it is loud, tight, hot and completely absorbing: cloth, tomatoes, shea butter, secondhand shoes, plastic buckets, enamelware, fish, and traders calling over each other. Go with a small bag worn in front, carry small notes, expect to be quoted a visitor's price first, and accept that you will be jostled. An hour is plenty for most people. If markets are your thing, our guide to shopping in Ghanaian markets covers what is actually worth buying and how bargaining works.

Spend the late afternoon at the W. E. B. Du Bois Memorial Centre in Cantonments, where the scholar spent his last years and is buried, or at the National Museum if it is open — its reopening has been staged over several years, so check before you build a day around it.

Day three: the coast, and slowing down

Give the third day to the sea and to whatever you liked most on the first two, because three days in Accra is exactly enough to have found something you want to repeat.

Labadi Beach is the obvious choice and the honest one. It is not a quiet tropical shoreline: there is an entrance charge, horses for hire, drummers, hawkers, football, sound systems and a great many people, particularly at weekends. That is the point of it. Labadi is where Accra goes to enjoy itself, and a Sunday afternoon there is one of the more cheerful things you can do in the city. Swim with caution — the current along this coast is strong and the shore break can be heavy.

If you want calm water and space instead, the beaches east towards Teshie, Nungua and Prampram are quieter, and a number of hotels along that stretch let non-residents use the pool and the sand for a fee. Ask first rather than walking in.

The other good use of a third day is a short trip out of the city. Aburi Botanical Gardens, up the Akuapem ridge, is about an hour from Accra outside rush hour and noticeably cooler, with huge old trees and a road lined with woodcarvers at Ahwerease. Shai Hills, eastward towards Dodowa, gives you baboons and rock outcrops within ninety minutes. Both are covered properly in our piece on day trips from Accra.

What and where to eat

Eat Ghanaian food at the times Ghanaians eat it, and Accra becomes much more interesting than its restaurant listings suggest.

Waakye is a morning dish — rice and beans cooked with dried millet leaves until it turns reddish-brown, served with shito, gari, spaghetti, boiled egg and a piece of fish or meat, wrapped in leaves and paper. The good sellers are gone by early afternoon. Ask where the queue is; the queue is the recommendation.

Evening belongs to banku and grilled tilapia with pepper sauce, eaten with your right hand, at a spot with plastic chairs and a television showing football. Jollof, kelewele — spiced fried plantain from a roadside pan after dark — red red, waatse, fufu with light soup or groundnut soup, and tuo zaafi from the northern kitchens all deserve a turn. Chop bars serve the real thing at the real price; the polished restaurants in Osu, Cantonments and Airport Residential do refined versions of the same food alongside Lebanese, Indian, Chinese and Italian menus.

In Accra the queue is the review.

Two practical notes. Ghanaian pepper is hotter than most visitors expect, and “small pepper” is a phrase worth learning. And drink bottled or sachet water rather than tap water, take it steadily through the day, and expect to need more than you think in this humidity.

The 72 hours at a glance

Here is the whole plan in one table, built around the early-morning and late-afternoon windows.

Adjust it for the day of the week. Makola is quieter on a Sunday and overwhelming on a Saturday. Labadi is busiest on Sunday afternoons and on public holidays. Museums and memorial sites keep shorter hours than you expect and some close on particular days, so have a driver or a hotel call ahead in the morning rather than arriving to a locked gate.

What will annoy you, honestly

Three things frustrate almost every first-time visitor to Accra, and knowing them in advance takes most of the sting out.

The first is that everything takes longer than the map says. Distances in Accra are short and journeys are long. Build slack into every plan, never schedule two fixed appointments in one afternoon, and treat any evening crossing of the city as a gamble.

The second is being sold to. In tourist areas you will be approached repeatedly — at the Arts Centre, at Labadi, outside the memorial park — and the opening price you are given is not the real one. This is trade, not hostility. A friendly, unhurried no works better than irritation, and if you do want to buy, walking away is a legitimate and expected part of the negotiation.

The third is the physical wear: heat, dust, uneven pavements, open gutters at the kerbside, and noise that starts before dawn with church services and calls to prayer. Wear shoes you can walk in, watch your footing, carry water, and take the middle of the day off properly rather than pushing through it.

None of this makes Accra difficult. It makes it a city rather than a resort, and the visitors who enjoy it most are the ones who stop fighting its rhythm by the second morning.

If you have four days, or only two

With a fourth day, leave the city; with only two, cut day three and keep the first two intact.

A fourth day is best spent on the coast road west. Cape Coast and Elmina are roughly three hours from Accra through Kasoa and Winneba in normal traffic, and while the castles deserve an overnight rather than a rush, a very long day trip is possible if you leave by six in the morning. Kakum's canopy walkway sits about forty minutes inland from Cape Coast and rewards an early start before the tour groups arrive.

With two days, do Jamestown on the first morning and the Nkrumah park on the second, and drop Makola if crowds are not your thing. You will have seen the city's origin and its founding story, which is the part that makes the rest legible.

If Accra is the start of something longer, the sensible next legs are the Central Region castles, Kumasi for the Ashanti court and Kejetia market, and Mole in the north. Our seven-day Ghana itinerary sets out how those join up without wasting days on the road.

How we put an Accra trip together

Ghana Travel & Tour runs guided days in Accra with drivers who know which approach to Makola is passable at eleven in the morning and which is not, and with local guides in Jamestown who introduce you to the neighbourhood rather than parade you through it. We also handle airport pickup at Kotoka, hotels and short-let homes, and the day trips out to Aburi, Shai Hills or the Cape Coast road.

You can see the current programmes on our guided tours page. Quotes are itemised, so you can see the vehicle, the guide and the entries separately, and they come from a named trip manager you deal with throughout.

Questions people ask