Plateau, UNESCO Île de Gorée and the Museum of Black Civilisations

The southern tip of the Cap-Vert peninsula is where modern Dakar began and where its deepest historical layers sit side by side. Within a two-kilometre radius in Plateau, you can step from a twenty-first-century pan-African museum to a colonial square shaded by giant fig trees and board the ferry across the sheltered harbour to Île de Gorée.

Crossing to UNESCO-listed Île de Gorée

Lying three kilometres east of the Port of Dakar, the 28-hectare volcanic island of Gorée has no cars, no paved asphalt roads and a stillness that contrasts sharply with the mainland. Occupied successively by Portuguese, Dutch, British and French powers from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the entire island is a UNESCO World Heritage site:

• House of Slaves (Maison des Esclaves): built in the late eighteenth century with pink-ochre walls and a double curving staircase, where the ground-floor stone cells and the low Door of No Return opening directly onto the Atlantic rocks stand as a solemn memorial to the transatlantic slave trade. Listen to the curator's address in the courtyard before climbing upstairs to the historical panels.
• The Castel, Fort d'Estrées and St Charles Borromée Church: walk past the circular stone bastion of Fort d'Estrées at the harbour edge, pass the 1830 church and follow the cobbled path up the southern basalt bluff of Le Castel for panoramic views back across the water to the Plateau skyline.

Back on the Mainland: Museum of Black Civilisations and Place de l'Indépendance

Ten minutes on foot from the ferry terminal and the restored Gare de Dakar rises the circular Museum of Black Civilisations (Musée des Civilisations Noires). Opened in 2018 to fulfil Léopold Sédar Senghor's decades-long vision, its grand atrium features a towering steel baobab sculpture by Haitian artist Édouard Duval-Carrié, surrounded by galleries tracing human origins in Africa, royal kingdoms, Islamic scholarship in West Africa and contemporary diaspora art. From the museum, stroll south past the white palace of the Presidency and the IFAN Museum of African Arts on Place Soweto before finishing with a café terrace along Place de l'Indépendance or Day 1 of our Dakar itinerary.