What is the political capital of Ivory Coast?

Yamoussoukro became the capital in 1983 by the decision of the country's first president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, who had been born in the village that stood there. He transformed it with a scale of building far beyond what the town's size warranted, including enormously wide boulevards, a presidential palace with an artificial lake, and above all the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace, a domed church modelled on St Peter's in Rome and one of the largest churches anywhere, consecrated by the pope in the early 1990s. The transfer of government was declared but never fully carried out; ministries, embassies and the practical business of the state largely stayed in Abidjan on the coastal lagoon, which remains the economic capital and by far the larger city. The result is a formal capital that functions more as a monument to its founder than as a working seat of government.

Ivory Coast is one of the world's leading cocoa producers, and that trade drives the port economy on the coast.