Pre 20th Century History

St-Louis began its life in 1659 as a French encampment on an island strategically situated at the mouth of the Senegal river. For the French, the location of the island was serendipitous. It afforded them a strategically secure position from which to control inbound and outbound traffic on a river that curved around modern-day Senegal, skirting Mauritania and bifurcating into Mali, with its source in the lush green mountains of modern-day Guinea. St-Louis was more than just a port: it turned out, more by luck than by design, to be the French foothold into Africa.

There were two resources that the French were especially interested in. The first was gum arabic, a natural gum harvested from two sub-Saharan species of acacia. It has long been used in the food industry as a stabiliser, thickener and emulsifier, as well as in the manufacture of inks. The second resource turned out to be vastly more profitable: the trade of human souls. It's thought that 20 million Africans were traded as slaves, most of them from West Africa. The French sent most of their slaves to Louisiana and the Caribbean, and the French ports of Bordeaux and Nantes glittered with the profits of this commerce.

Slavery was outlawed by the revolutionary government of 1792 and the residents of St-Louis, along with those of other French colonies, were granted citizenship. Most notable among the residents of that time, numbering about 10,000, were the signares, women of mixed race who temporarily 'married' European merchants based in the city, and thereby gained great wealth and privilege. They initiated Les Fanals, the festival of decorated lanterns, which still occurs in St-Louis in the weeks around Christmas and also accompanies the annual jazz festival.

Thirteen years later, however, Napoleon legitimised slavery, only to ban it in 1815 in a vain attempt to get the British onside. Around this time, St-Louis became the capital of French West Africa. Slavery continued informally until 1848. By that time, St-Louis was at its peak, the undisputed capital of the French West African holdings. St-Louis' port capacity, however, was soon thereafter outgrown by the expansion of French commerce in the region; Dakar's port soon eclipsed the island's, and the focus of colonial activity shifted southward.

Modern History

St-Louis' decline was gradual. The island-city remained the capital of French West Africa, but in 1902 even that honorific was taken from it. Although it remained the capital of Senegal and Mauritania until 1958, the city gradually became a commercial and administrative backwater, and the annals of its 20th-century history would have been thin indeed if not for the advent of the aviation industry, and for the literary talents of one man: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. In his first novel, Southern Mail, the writer of The Little Prince evocatively described the nocturnal flight taking mail from France to Senegal. In fact, St-Louis was one of a series of outposts linking, by air and by telegraph, France with West Africa and, later, with Latin America. The publication of Southern Mail - Vol de nuit in French, sometimes translated as Night Flight - helped engrave the name St-Louis into the imaginations of an entirely new generation in France.

Recent History

Advances in aviation and telecommunications technology meant that soon even the planes were bypassing St-Louis. The city fell into a kind of Sahelian slumber; the French part of the city fell into decay, while on Guet N'Dar, the Wolof fishing village on the sliver of peninsula to the west, life continued according to its own rhythms. Curiously, as often happens, this neglect was the cause of the city's eventual renaissance.

St-Louis began its reawakening in recent decades with the advent of mass tourism. The conservation of a range of colonial-era architecture led to the island's classification as a Unesco World Heritage site in 2000. Buildings are now being renovated at an impressive rate, so it's worth visiting this easy-going city soon, in case the air of faded elegance is replaced by that of an all-too-perfect tourist trap.

Guet N'Dar, Beach

This small village, on the Langue de Barbarie peninsula, is linked to St-Louis by a much more modest bridge than the Pont Faidherbe. There's a lighthouse and a beach, but you can forget about sunbathing - every morning, some 200 pirogues (canoes) are launched into the sea, returning in the afternoon to unload their fish on the sand, a spectacular sight.

Parc National de la Langue de Barbarie, National Park

This park includes the far southern tip of the Langue de Barbarie peninsula, the estuary of the Senegal River (which contains two small islands) and a section of the mainland on the other side of the estuary. The park covers a total area of 2000 hectares, and is home to numerous water birds, swelled from November to April by migrant birds from Europe.

If you choose to come to the park independently, you must first go to the park office at Mouit to pay your entrance fee. At the river you can hire a pirogue (traditional canoe).

Pont Faidherbe, Women Only, Bridge

Designed by Gustav Eiffel and originally built to cross the Danube, the Pont Faidherbe, linking the mainland and island, was transferred to St-Louis in 1897. The bridge is a grand piece of 19th-century engineering - 507m (1663ft) long with a middle section that once rotated to allow ships to steam up the Senegal River. It's worth walking for the view.