Spain sells Equatorial Guinea in the second middle of XIX

What if Spain sells its colonies of Equatorial Guinea in order to bail out the cases: she sells the island of Fernando Po to Britain, the mainland (Rio Muni) to France and cedes Annobon to Portugal? Here is a map:

1565094122-carte-2.png
 
This is kind of an esoteric post.

I'm not sure if these lands were important enough to justify any kind of purchase price which would help Spain's finances. I also don't know if these lands were instrumental in protecting the route from Spain to the Philippines.

I suppose that there would always be some customers. France and Britain have plenty of good ports and colonies in the area.

Prussia and Austria may be interested if there is an early scramble for Africa.

Maybe the US would want a naval base as well in the region (this is prior to the Spanish-American War).

Again, I'm not sure why Spain would sell given the price would likely be low.
 

Lusitania

Donor
The Spanish had received these lands from the Portuguese at end of the 18th century to provide Spain with source to African Slaves. So they had no economic value to sailing to Philippines and were practically ignored by the Spanish. Pride and desire to continue some sort of imperialistic ambition especially after the American colonies had become independent was only reason to stay. There also was no economic value to any country to buy the territory from Spain during that time that they could not get from other parts of their respective empires without need to buy these lands from Spain.
 
Didn't the young state of Belgium have a recurrent pipedream about having a colony of their own?

From what I gather, this was mostly fueled by
Leopold II's desire to drag his country, kicking and screaming if must be, into the XXth century. So it really won't be prominent until 1865, but if we fudge the dates a little, we might end up with Belgian Guinea instead of Belgian Congo.

Not sure if that will be an improvement though.
 
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