Capital Ouagadougou
Largest city Ouagadougou
Official language(s) French
Population
13,228,000
Currency CFA franc
Calling code +226

Similar all of the west of Africa, Burkina Faso was populated early, notably by hunter-gatherers in the northwestern part of the country (12,000 to 5000 BC), and whose tools (scrapers, chisels and arrowheads) were detected in 1973. Colonies seemed betwixt 3600 and 2600 BC by having farmers, the traces of whose structures leave the impression of relatively permanent buildings. The employ of iron, ceramics and polished stone developed between 1500 and 1000 BC, as well as a preoccupation sustaining spiritual matters, as shown by the burial rests which one have been detected.

Relics of the Dogon are detected in the centre-north, north and north west region. They left the area between the 15th and 16th centuries BC to settle in the cliffs of Bandiagara. Elsewhere, the rests of high walls are placed in the southwest of Burkina Faso (too as in the Cote d'Ivoire), but the population who constructed them have not yet been emphatically identified.

Burkina Faso was a super significant economic region for the Songhai Empire during the 15th and 16th centuries.

Burkina Faso is comprised of two big types of countryside:

* The bigger part of the country is covered by a peneplain which forms a gently undulating landscape using, in some areas, a few isolated hills, the last vestiges of a precambrian massif.

* The south-west of the country forms a sandstone massif, where the highest peak is found: Tenakourou. The massif is framed by sheer cliffs up to 150 metres (490 ft) high.

The average altitude is 400 metres (1,300 ft) and the difference between the highest and lowest terrain is no larger than 600 metres (2,000 ft). Burkina Faso is therefore a relatively flat country, sustaining a very few localised exclusions.