Mbandaka

Mbandaka was founded in 1883 by British explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who named it "Équateurville". (At the time the territory was under the personal rule of King Leopold II, king of the Belgians and the official language was French.) The town hall is about 4 km (2.5 miles) north of the equator. Mbandaka is one of the closest to the equator of any substantial city in the world. Stanley placed a large "Equator Stone" near the riverbank south of the city to mark the point where he believed the equator crossed the river. It remains there today. Due to its symbolic location close to the equator and the Congo River, there were early plans to locate the capital of the Congo Free State in Coquilhatville, as the city was then called, but they never came off the drawing board. …

Mbandaka lies on the east bank of the Congo River below the mouth of the Ruki River, a tributary of the Congo. South of the Ngiri Reserve, a large area of swamp forest on the opposite bank of the Congo, it is located at the center of the Tumba-Ngiri-Maindombe wetland.