Manhyia Palace museum dethrones Kumasi Zoo as Ashanti Region’s top tourist draw
A shift has taken place at the top of the Ashanti Region’s tourism rankings, and it carries a story about heritage, identity, and the growing appetite among Ghanaians to engage with their own history.
The Manhyia Palace Museum in Kumasi has overtaken the Kumasi Zoo to become the region’s most visited tourist attraction since the start of 2026, a development that the Ashanti Regional Director of the Ghana Tourism Authority, Fredrick Adjei Rudolph, confirmed while speaking on Luv FM.
The numbers tell the story with precision. The Manhyia Palace Museum has recorded approximately 120,000 visitors so far in 2026, while the Kumasi Zoo stands at around 118,000, a margin of roughly 2,000 visitors that has been enough to flip the regional rankings for the first time. The Zoo had held the top spot in the Ashanti Region in 2025, ranking fourth nationally and attracting 118,764 visitors across the full year, with over 20,000 already through its gates in the early weeks of 2026.
“This year, Manhyia Museum is beating Kumasi Zoo,” Rudolph confirmed. “Manhyia Museum has so far recorded 120,000 visitors, while Kumasi Zoo stands at 118,000.”
Perhaps the more revealing dimension of the data is who is doing the visiting. Domestic tourism is overwhelmingly driving patronage at both sites. In 2025, Manhyia Palace recorded visits from 102,000 Ghanaians compared to just 17,900 foreign tourists. At the Kumasi Zoo, the domestic-to-foreign visitor ratio was even more pronounced, 117,000 Ghanaian arrivals against a mere 933 international visitors. The message is clear: it is Ghanaians themselves who are sustaining the region’s tourism economy, and their interest in the Manhyia Palace’s rich Asante heritage appears to be growing.
Rudolph also used the occasion to cast a spotlight on a site he believes has been significantly undervalued, Lake Bosomtwe, the only natural lake in Ghana, which he argued could become one of the country’s premier tourist destinations if properly developed and managed.
His vision for the lake is ambitious and multifaceted, encompassing ecotourism, bird watching, hiking, and cycling, alongside scientific and educational tourism, cultural programming featuring festivals, traditional storytelling, local crafts and food, community-run guesthouses, and water-based recreation.
“If you are able to make 10 million in a year and we are talking about Lake Bosomtwe which is going to have about four diversions, I am not a mathematician but I believe we could make more than 10 million from Lake Bosomtwe,” he said, suggesting the lake’s revenue potential could exceed that of the Kwame Nkrumah Museum in Accra.
But realising that potential requires confronting a set of challenges that have suppressed visitor numbers at the lake for years. Rudolph identified three core problem areas: poor access roads that make reaching the lake difficult, waste management and pollution issues that undermine the visitor experience, and incidents of extortion that have left tourists with negative impressions and little reason to return.
Until those problems are addressed systematically, Bosomtwe’s considerable natural and cultural assets will remain largely untapped. The Ashanti Region’s tourism story, for now, is being written at the Manhyia Palace, where 120,000 visitors have already turned up this year to connect with the history of one of Africa’s most storied kingdoms.
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