Boti Falls & Aburi Botanical Gardens: A Day-Trip Guide from Accra
Chase twin waterfalls at Boti, walk the historic Aburi Botanical Gardens and trace Ghana's cocoa trail — the best day trip from Accra to Ghana's Eastern Region.
Twin waterfalls, a 19th-century botanical garden and the cocoa farms that shaped a nation's fortune — the Eastern Region packs Ghana's greenest day trip into one easy loop from Accra.
By Peter Mensah · September 27, 2026 · 5 min read
Some day trips give you one good thing. Ghana's Eastern Region gives you three: a pair of waterfalls falling side by side through the forest, a botanical garden that has been growing since 1890, and the cocoa country that helped make Ghana one of the world's great chocolate nations. All of it sits within reach of Accra in a single unhurried day.
Boti: the twin falls of the Huhunya forest
Boti Falls is a twin waterfall in the Yilo Krobo District, about 17 kilometres northeast of Koforidua, roughly a half-hour drive from the regional capital and a little over an hour and a half from Accra, traffic permitting. Two rivers emerge from the forest of Huhunya and drop together, side by side, over a 30-metre rock face into a pool below.
Local tradition reads the pair as a couple: the larger fall is the male, the smaller the female, and folklore says a rainbow forms where their waters merge. The approach is half the drama, some 250 concrete steps lead down through the canyon to the base, and in high flow you descend through a wall of spray with water on both sides of the path.
The falls are seasonal. Fed by the Ponmpon River as it runs through the Huhunya forest reserve, they reach full power in the rainy months, but even in the dry season the cool canyon and the swim-friendly pool at the base make the walk worthwhile. Boti's fame goes back decades: the falls were a celebrated outing in the 1960s, visited by Ghana's first president, Dr Kwame Nkrumah. Local oral history adds that the falls were first found in the forest by a Catholic priest surveying the area, one more chapter in a place built out of stories.
Aburi: a garden with a cocoa empire behind it
In the Akwapim hills of Ghana's Eastern Region, the Aburi Botanical Gardens occupy 64.8 hectares of hillside. They opened in March 1890, founded by Governor William Brandford-Griffith and Dr John Farrell Easmon, a Sierra Leonean medical doctor, on the site of a 1875 sanatorium built for Gold Coast government officials. The clearing that turned that hillside into the colony's Botanic Department was supervised by Alexander Worthy Clerk, a Basel missionary of Jamaican Moravian heritage.
The garden's first curator, William Crowther, came to the post as a student of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the institution that grew from his clearing changed Ghanaian agriculture forever. Aburi supplied cheap cocoa seedlings and scientific farming know-how that helped encourage cocoa production across southern Ghana. When Hevea brasiliensis, the rubber tree, was sent to Aburi from Kew in 1893, the gardens also seeded Ghana's rubber industry.
Today those same avenues, planted with ornamental trees, palms and tropical botanical collections over more than a century, are one of the calmest places in the country: a place to walk, breathe and understand why this garden features in every Ghanaian school textbook.
More than a century on, the mission continues: Aburi is today among the institutions leading the fight to save plant diversity in West Africa, its living collections reading like a map of the tropical world.
The cocoa trail
Between the falls and the gardens, the Eastern Region is cocoa country, and our tours stop at a working cocoa farm along the way. Seeing pods split open on the trunk, beans drying in the sun and the whole fermentation-to-bar chain explained by the people who run it turns a chocolate bar into a story you will never forget. Ask your host to break a fresh pod open, the sweet white pulp around the beans is where every chocolate flavour begins.
Planning your day
Start early from Accra, the Aburi hills are best before the midday heat. Take the Aburi gardens first, then continue to Boti for the afternoon descent to the falls. Wear proper shoes: 250 steps down (and back up) are no joke in the humidity. Carry cash for entrance fees, local guides and roadside cocoa, plantain and palm-wine stops. Visit in or just after the rains (roughly June to October) if the twin falls at full thunder…