Guinea-Bissau country guide — sources and map notes
Reviewed: 29 October 2026

Reading and context
- Encyclopaedia Britannica: Guinea-Bissau, geography, history, people, government and cultural life
  https://www.britannica.com/place/Guinea-Bissau
- World Bank country overview: cashews, livelihoods and political context, including the November 2025 military takeover
  https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/guineabissau/overview
- UNESCO: Coastal and Marine Ecosystems of the Bijagós Archipelago – Omatí Minhô, inscribed in 2025
  https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1431/
  https://whc.unesco.org/en/statesparties/gw/
  The World Heritage property has defined boundaries; it is not the whole country or a blanket listing of every island.
- IBAP (national protected-area authority): Orango, João Vieira–Poilão, Cacheu, Cufada and Cantanhez
  https://ibapgbissau.org/

Administrative maps
Natural Earth 1:10m admin-1 states and provinces, public domain.
https://www.naturalearthdata.com/about/terms-of-use/
https://github.com/nvkelso/natural-earth-vector/blob/master/geojson/ne_10m_admin_1_states_provinces.geojson
The retained snapshot has all eight regions and Bissau's autonomous sector:
GW-BA Bafatá, GW-BM Biombo, GW-BL Bolama, GW-BS Bissau, GW-CA Cacheu,
GW-GA Gabú, GW-OI Oio, GW-QU Quinara and GW-TO Tombali.
Bolama includes the Bijagós islands. These are administrative units, not federal states.
The national learning outline is the union of these nine geometries. Boundaries,
coasts and small islands are generalized. Map data is for learning, not navigation.

Cities and towns
GeoNames Guinea-Bissau gazetteer, CC BY 4.0, retrieved 29 October 2026.
https://download.geonames.org/export/dump/GW.zip
https://www.geonames.org/about.html
Sixteen populated places use retained GeoNames IDs and approximate centres.
Name-only lookup is deliberately avoided: several villages share the names Bafatá,
Bissorã, Canchungo, Quebo and São Domingos. Quebo uses the entry with the historical
name Aldeia Formosa, checked against https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebo.
Coastal pins may be slightly outside the generalized administrative coastline;
verified exceptions and offsets are recorded in the guide review.

Waters
OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0, via Geofabrik country extracts retrieved
29 October 2026. The retained derived water snapshot and source-way IDs are in
scripts/guinea-bissau-water-source.geojson and
scripts/guinea-bissau-water-source-metadata.json.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright
https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1-0/
https://download.geofabrik.de/africa/guinea-bissau.html
https://download.geofabrik.de/africa/guinea.html
https://download.geofabrik.de/africa/senegal-and-gambia.html
The Geba includes named Kayanga reaches across borders, and the Corubal includes
named Tominé reaches in Guinea. Other answers are Cacheu, Mansôa, Rio Grande de
Buba, Tombali and Cacine. River lines are named mapped channels, not bank polygons,
complete tributary networks or the full width of estuaries. Available mapped gaps
are retained rather than bridged with invented lines. No river is clipped at the
Guinea-Bissau border. Pan and zoom out for upstream reaches.
The Atlantic answer is a representative offshore learning area west of the Bijagós,
not an ocean boundary or a maritime jurisdiction. Its edges are hidden in the game.
Natural Earth's small-scale Gêba river feature was not used because it combines
segments that do not describe the Geba alone.

Photographs
The ten existing, locally hosted photographs in /images/facts-africa/gw/ are
reused with their existing subject descriptions and credits. File pages and
licences are retained in src/lib/african-facts-heroes.json under GW, and repeated
in src/lib/guinea-bissau-guide-content.json. The beach hero depicts Bruce Beach,
Bubaque; a market-vegetable photo illustrates the food topic and is not labelled
as a prepared dish. No new image licence is asserted.

Language and access
Portuguese is official. Kriol (Guinea-Bissau Creole) and community languages have
their own contexts. The linked Worldly course teaches general Portuguese, not Kriol.
Sight pins are approximate learning locations. They do not establish an entrance,
route, access permission or protected-area boundary. Amura is a military site;
island visits and protected areas require local guidance and applicable permissions.

Rebuild: node scripts/build-guinea-bissau-map.mjs
Checks: node scripts/test-guinea-bissau-guide.cjs
Live checks: GW_BASE_URL=https://worldly.academy node scripts/test-guinea-bissau-guide.cjs