The city was named after the Franco-Italian explorer, Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, who founded the city in 1880 on the site of a village named Nkuna. Home to over a third of the country’s total population -around 2.5 million inhabitants- and catering to 40% of its non-agricultural employment, Brazzaville is considered to be the financial and administrative capital of the Republic of Congo.
Brazzaville sits on the right bank of the Congo River, the second largest river in Africa after the Nile, just across from Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly known as Zaire. Brazzaville and Kinshasa are currently the only two capitals to be separated by a river and within visible sight of each other. The abundance of tropical foliage, earned Brazzaville the label of ‘Brazza la verte’ or Green Brazza.
