At the foot of the Virunga volcanoes sits a town that has learned to grow without turning its back on the forest above it. Musanze is what the edge looks like when it works.
From the main road, the volcanoes rise like a held breath — and the town hums at their base, busy and unbothered, a market a few miles from some of the last mountain gorillas on earth.
A town with a view
Prosperity and conservation are too often told as a trade: one only grows when the other gives way. Musanze is quietly arguing the opposite. Here, the forest is not a constraint on the town’s future. It is part of it.
Conservation and prosperity rise together, or not at all.
— GREENLANE Field Team
It is not perfect, and no one here pretends it is. But it is proof — visible from the main road — that a community and a wild place can share an horizon. That is the lane, made real. That is room for all of us.