Nakore Mosque

Nakore Mosque is a small historic mud mosque in the village of Nakore, southwest of Wa in the Upper West Region of Ghana, within Wa Municipal District. It is built in the Sudano-Sahelian (Sudanic) architectural style, and shares features with the better-known Larabanga Mosque: a timber-frame structure supporting a flat mud roof, with reinforcing timbers that protrude from the walls and serve as scaffolding when the building is replastered.

The exterior is defined by irregularly shaped buttresses topped with pinnacles that project above the parapet, and by two pyramidal towers — a minaret and a mihrab — that stand taller than the buttresses. One tower faces east above the mihrab and contains a small prayer or meditation room known as a haluwa. Above the entrances, decorative triangular recesses are said by local people to represent the five daily prayers.

The mosque remains an active place of worship and serves as Friday prayer grounds; it is also described as a place of pilgrimage for Muslim communities. Just south of the building is a burial area for imams and some royal chiefs, marked by tombstones bearing Arabic script. A large clay pot outside holds water for ablutions. On-site features also include a low perimeter wall around a plastered clearing, interior electric lighting, and a megaphone loudspeaker mounted on a buttress for the call to prayer.

Historians place the mosque's construction in the earliest 17th century, when Mande warriors followed old Songhai trade routes south into present-day Ghana. A local guide's claim that it was built in 1308 does not align with academic research. It is among Ghana's few remaining ancient mud mosques and forms part of the 'Trade Pilgrimage Routes of North-Western Ghana' entry on Ghana's UNESCO Tentative List, submitted on 17 January 2000.

Practical information is limited. Local guides can be arranged on site, and visitors have been asked to speak with a guide before photographing or entering the old mosque; a visitor's register was present in 2018. No toilets, shops, parking or visitor centre are documented. Published coordinates disagree between sources, so the exact surveyed location is unconfirmed.