Pauléoula


Pauléoula is a village in the far west of Ivory Coast. It is in the sub-prefecture of Taï, Taï Department, Cavally Region, Montagnes District. The village is just over three kilometres east of the Cavally River, which is the border with Liberia.
Pauléoula was a commune until March 2012, when it became one of 1126 communes nationwide that were abolished.
The original population of Pauléoula consisted mostly of members of the Oubi ethnic group, a small subgroup of the Krahn or Guéré people.

A few kilometers east of Pauléoula, within the boundaries of the Taï National Park, lies a small research centre, the 'Institut d'Écologie Tropicale'. It was a lonely house in the forest, not far from this institute, where the Swiss scientist Christophe Boesch in the 1980s conducted his famous research on the behaviour of tool-using Chimpanzees. Later, between 2008–2012, the movie Chimpanzee was filmed here, under difficult conditions, and with Boesch as principal scientific consultant.