Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL
Capital: Dakar
Population: 19 million+
Language: French/Wolof
1 – Gorée Island (also above)
A tiny island of pastel houses and cobbled lanes just off Dakar, Gorée is one of the most poignant places in Africa — for centuries a trading post fought over by the Portuguese, Dutch, British and French, and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site that stands as a memorial to the Atlantic slave trade.
At its heart is the Maison des Esclaves, the “House of Slaves,” built in 1776, where visitors file through the cramped cells and out to the “Door of No Return,” a doorway opening straight onto the ocean — the last of Africa many enslaved people were said to see; today it draws pilgrims from across the diaspora, and world leaders from Mandela to the Pope.
Historians actually debate how many captives ever passed through Gorée itself — likely fewer than the millions once claimed, since most of the trade flowed through other ports — yet none of that has lessened the island’s power: it endures as one of the world’s great symbols of remembrance for the whole tragedy of slavery.
2 – Saloum Delta National Park
Where the Saloum River fans out into the Atlantic in west-central Senegal lies a vast watery labyrinth of mangroves, tidal channels and more than 200 islands — a UNESCO World Heritage Site sometimes called “the Amazon of Senegal,” and home to the Serer people who have fished and gathered shellfish here for thousands of years.
The way to explore it is by wooden pirogue, gliding through the mangrove-lined “bolongs” past flocks of flamingos and pelicans, oyster beds clinging to the roots and quiet fishing villages, with dolphins offshore and some of the richest birdlife in West Africa.
The delta’s greatest wonder is made of shells: over more than two thousand years, the people here piled up their discarded cockle and clam shells into hundreds of vast mounds — some stretching for hundreds of metres — that gradually built up whole islands, and on a few of them lie the ancient burial tombs of the delta’s earliest inhabitants.
3 – Iles de la Madeleine
A cluster of tiny, uninhabited volcanic islands rising from the Atlantic just west of Dakar, the Îles de la Madeleine make up one of the smallest national parks in the world — barely half a square kilometre of steep basalt cliffs, hidden coves and wind-blasted rock.
Reached by boat, the main island of Sarpan is a birdwatcher’s gem — a nesting site for red-billed tropicbirds and cormorants, some of which raise their young in the branches of the island’s strangest inhabitants: baobab trees that, stunted and gnarled by the salt wind, grow as miniature, bonsai-like dwarfs found almost nowhere else.
The island is held sacred by Dakar’s Lebou fishing people, who believe a powerful spirit dwells here that will not share its home with humans — which, they say, is why no one has ever managed to build on it; to this day they leave offerings of milk and water at the foot of a great baobab where the spirit is said to live.
4 – Lake Retba
A short drive northeast of Dakar lies one of Senegal’s most surreal sights — Lake Retba, or “Lac Rose,” the Pink Lake, a shallow lagoon that can glow an astonishing strawberry-pink under the midday sun, its colour created by a tiny salt-loving alga that turns the water rosy to shield itself from the glare.
The lake is also one of the saltiest bodies of water on the planet — nearly ten times as salty as the sea, so, as in the Dead Sea, swimmers bob on the surface unable to sink; all day long salt-collectors wade in to scrape the precious salt from the bed by hand, their skin slathered in shea butter to stop the fierce brine from burning it.
For some twenty years, this pink lake was the storied finish line of the Paris-Dakar Rally — the gruelling desert car-and-motorbike race that took its very name from the Senegalese capital, whose exhausted, dust-caked drivers crossed their final line right here on its shores, until the event moved to South America in 2008.
5 – Djoudj bird sanctuary
In the far north of Senegal, where the Senegal River spreads into a maze of lakes and marshes at the desert’s edge, lies Djoudj — one of the greatest bird sanctuaries on Earth, a UNESCO World Heritage wetland that comes alive each year with as many as three million birds.
Glide through it by boat and the sky fills with wings: enormous colonies of white pelicans, clouds of pink flamingos, spoonbills, herons and cormorants among some 400 species crowd the water, in one of Africa’s most overwhelming wildlife spectacles.
The secret to Djoudj’s riches is its position — it’s the very first great oasis that migrating birds reach after crossing the Sahara: for millions of ducks, waders and songbirds flying south from Europe, this watery delta is the first food and fresh water at the end of a punishing desert crossing, and a lifeline without which they could not survive.
6 – Saint-Louis
Founded in 1659 on a low island in the mouth of the Senegal River, Saint-Louis was the first permanent French settlement in West Africa — capital of the whole of French West Africa until 1902 and of Senegal itself until 1957, which makes this quiet river town the administrative root of French Africa; UNESCO listed it in 2000.
The island is a grid of balconied colonial houses in ochre and faded blue, reached by the Pont Faidherbe, half a kilometre of iron shipped out in pieces and bolted together in 1897; over the bridge on a narrow spit lies Guet Ndar, a fishing quarter of extraordinary density where hundreds of painted pirogues are hauled up the beach each evening.
Saint-Louis was also the city of the signares — African and mixed-race women who took European traders as partners and ended up controlling much of the town’s shipping, property and trade, dressing in gold and imported silk and building the houses you still walk past today.
7 – Touba
Two hundred kilometres east of Dakar stands the holy city of the Mourides, founded in 1887 by Cheikh Amadou Bamba, whose insistence on resisting French rule through work and prayer rather than arms unsettled the colonial authorities enough that they exiled him to Gabon for seven years — which only multiplied his following, and left Senegal with its most powerful religious brotherhood.
The Great Mosque dominates everything, its central minaret rising 87m over one of the largest mosques in Africa, with Bamba’s tomb inside and a great library beside it; the city governs itself through the brotherhood rather than the state, and keeps itself free of alcohol, tobacco, music and football.
Once a year the Grand Magal brings millions of pilgrims pouring into Touba from across Senegal and the diaspora — and it commemorates not the saint’s birth or death, but the day the French put him on a ship and sent him into exile.
8 – Dakar
Africa’s westernmost city sits on the Cap-Vert peninsula, grown from a Lebu fishing village into the capital of French West Africa in 1902, when the administration moved down from Saint-Louis, and then into the capital of an independent Senegal in 1960.
The African Renaissance Monument stands 49m on a hill above the city, taller than the Statue of Liberty and argued over ever since it went up; below lie the Museum of Black Civilisations, opened in 2018 and built to hold what Africa gets back, the tight streets of the Médina, and the beaches and surf at Ngor and Yoff.
Senegal’s first president was Léopold Senghor, a poet elected to the Académie française, who in 1966 filled this city with the first World Festival of Black Arts — Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes and Wole Soyinka among thousands of others — and who then, almost uniquely in Africa at the time, handed over power voluntarily and went home to write.