Brazzaville is a busy, colourful city with busy markets, lively music pouring from cafés and huge trees lining wide avenues. The city was named after an Italian-French explorer called Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, who helped map the area in the 1880s. Today it is home to nearly two million people from hundreds of different ethnic groups.
The Congo River here is enormous - at some points it is over 10 kilometres wide, making it look almost like a sea. Ferries carry people, motorbikes and goods back and forth between Brazzaville and Kinshasa every day, making the two cities feel like very close neighbours even though they are in separate countries.
The city is known as the birthplace of soukous, a wonderfully energetic style of music and dance that spread from Brazzaville and Kinshasa to the rest of Africa and then the whole world. On weekends, people gather in open-air spaces to dance to live bands playing guitar, bass and fast, exciting rhythms.