West Africa's first European city — a river island of French colonial balconies, the Saint-Louis Jazz Festival, and Senegal's greatest thiéboudienne
Saint-Louis (Saint-Louis du Sénégal, called Ndar in Wolof) is the oldest European settlement in sub-Saharan Africa, founded by French traders in 1659 on a narrow island between the Senegal River and the Atlantic, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2000. The island's grid of French colonial buildings — wraparound iron balconies in varying states of picturesque decay, painted in faded ochre and terracotta, the streets wide enough for two horse-carts but barely a car — is one of the most atmospheric urban environments in West Africa. The Pont Faidherbe (1897), a 507m iron bridge designed by…
Saint-Louis island was uninhabited when French traders established a fort in 1659, naming it after King Louis XIV. It became the first permanent French settlement in West Africa and the base of the gum arabic trade (from Saharan acacia trees, used in textile dyeing across Europe). Under French West Africa from 1895, Saint-Louis was the continental administrative capital. The island's urban form — the colonial grid, the iron balconies, the Pont Faidherbe — dates almost entirely from the 19th century and has changed remarkably little since.