Loropéni

The best preserved of ten stone enclosures in the gold country near Gaoua: laterite walls about 6 metres high enclosing about 11,000 square metres.

UNESCO (2009) gives it at least a thousand years; it was at its height from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century and abandoned in the early nineteenth. The builders are not known: the Lorhon or the Kulango are assumed, the Gan (Kaan) later occupied it; that it guarded gold is an inference from circumstantial evidence. On 1 January 1200 the place was probably in use; whether the great wall already stood is not pinned.