Zuarungu is a historic settlement in the Bolgatanga Municipality of the **Upper East Region** of Ghana, and it sits just a few kilometres east of Bolgatanga town on the road toward the Burkina Faso border. It is the seat of the **Zuarungu Traditional Area**, whose paramount chief is the **Zuarungu Naba**, and it is one of the oldest and most culturally significant communities of the Frafra (Gurunsi) people. On the painted houses you mention — Zuarungu shares in the great **Gurunsi mural tradition** of the Upper East, the same art form that made **Sirigu** world-famous. Among the Frafra, Kusasi, Kassena and Nankani peoples, women decorate the outer walls of their compounds (the *yire*, a cluster of round mud rooms under a thatch or zinc roof) with geometric murals painted in earth pigments — red, white, black and ochre — using fingers, feathers and sticks. The designs are not mere decoration: they carry meaning, marking a woman's status, her husband's standing, clan identity, and often motifs drawn from the animal and plant world. The walls are also ritually renewed, especially after funerals and before the rainy season, when the first rains are believed to wash the old paintings away. Zuarungu itself is a town of real historical weight. It was an early administrative and missionary centre in the colonial Northern Territories — the **Zuarungu Senior High School** (founded in the 1950s) is one of the region's oldest second-cycle institutions, and the town long served as a district headquarters before the local government reorganisation that made Bolgatanga the municipal capital. Its market and its role as a gateway on the Bolgatanga–Bawku and Bolgatanga–Navrongo corridors keep it busy to this day. Culturally, Zuarungu is known for its **Frafra traditions** — the *Damba* festival, the *Gologo* harvest festival, and the *bɔɔ* (funeral) rites — and for the distinctive **Frafra basket weaving** and straw-hat (*zunga*) craft of the wider Bolgatanga area, which UNESCO has recognised as intangible cultural heritage. The local language is **Frafra (Gurenɛ)**, and the people are predominantly farmers of millet, guinea corn, groundnuts and, increasingly, rice along the Volta tributaries. So if you are mapping Ghana's painted-house villages, Zuarungu belongs on the same list as Sirigu, Kandiga, Mirigu and Tilli — the mural heartland of the Upper East. As the Akan would say, *"Yɛn nyɛ adwuma baako"* — we are not doing one work alone; each of these towns carries a piece of the same beautiful tradition.