Ouaga carries two histories at once: the Mossi kingdoms that resisted conquest for 500 years, and the 1983 revolution that renamed Upper Volta 'Land of Upright People'. Three days of palaces, national museums and revolutionary ground.
The national museum on Avenue de l'Indépendance holds masks, Mossi royal regalia and ethnographic collections from all 60+ ethnic groups. Tue–Sat roughly 09:00–17:00. Entry around 1.000 FCFA; guided tour in French adds a few hundred.
The music museum documents the instruments of the Mossi court — the bendré talking drum reserved for the Naba, balafons and kora — and their role in oral history-keeping before written records reached the Volta basin.
The old Friday mosque in Dapoya, built in Sudano-Sahelian mud-and-timber style with protruding toron beams, marks the arrival of Islam among Mossi traders. Exterior viewing is free; non-Muslims stay outside prayer halls.
The Naba Koom monument — a giant statue of a woman holding a calabash of water — stands opposite the railway station, honouring Mossi hospitality tradition and the forced-labour era when men were conscripted for the Abidjan railway.
The site where Thomas Sankara and twelve comrades were killed on 15 October 1987. The bullet-marked building and graves are preserved, with the Mémorial Thomas Sankara complex rising around them. Entry roughly 1.000–2.000 FCFA.
The towering Monument aux Martyrs on the Ouaga 2000 boulevard commemorates Burkinabè who died in the liberation struggles and in service of the nation. Its concrete tower and surrounding esplanade are a favourite protest gathering point.
The Heroes' Monument — five soaring pillars near the airport road — was raised to honour those who died for the nation. The plaza reads as the state's official memory, deliberately contrasting with the grassroots Sankara site.
The square where Sankara proclaimed the revolution in 1983 and where the 2014 uprising that toppled Blaise Compaoré gathered. The burned National Assembly stands nearby as physical evidence of that insurrection.
An open-air museum 55 km north of Ouaga built by lawyer-poet Frédéric Pacéré Titinga: reconstructed Mossi compounds, a granite pavilion of bronze, and the largest collection of Mossi funeral masks and royal artefacts in the country.
The national artisan village preserves crafts with deep historical lineage: Mossi bronze lost-wax casting, bogolan mud-cloth dyeing and Gourounsi geometric wall painting, each workshop tracing techniques back generations.
The red-brick twin-towered cathedral, completed in 1936 by the White Fathers using local laterite, is the seat of the archdiocese and one of the largest colonial-era churches in West Africa. Free entry outside Mass.
Once the sacred forest of the Mossi emperors — 'forest of knowledge' in Mooré — where only the Naba and initiates could enter. Now a 240-hectare urban park, still holding the ritual sites and old-growth trees of the royal domain.