French West Africa's first colonial capital — a crumbling island city on the Senegal River, World Heritage jazz and Creole culture, and the best thiéboudienne on the coast
Saint-Louis (Saint-Louis du Sénégal, or Ndar in Wolof) is a UNESCO World Heritage city at the mouth of the Senegal River — a narrow island connected by bridges to the mainland and to a thin sand tongue separating the river from the Atlantic. It was the first French colonial city in West Africa (founded 1659) and the capital of French West Africa until 1902, and its grid of 18th–19th-century colonial buildings — yellow and ochre mansions with iron balconies, colonnaded arcades, and the decayed grandeur of a city that was once the most sophisticated in sub-Saharan Africa — give it a haunting, m…
Saint-Louis was founded by Louis Caullier for the French East India Company in 1659 on an uninhabited island — the first permanent European settlement in West Africa south of Cape Verde. It became the administrative capital of French Senegal and of the broader French West Africa (AOF) from 1895 to 1902, when the capital was moved to Dakar. The city's métis merchant class (known as signares — female traders of mixed French-African origin who married French officials and merchants) dominated the commercial life of Senegambia throughout the 18th–19th centuries and built the characteristic coloni…