Saint-Louis

The French set up a trading post in 1659 on the island of Ndar, a sandbank in the Senegal River sheltered behind the spit, and named it for Louis XIV. From there companies traded gum arabic from the interior, hides, gold and captives, and the post grew into a town of two-storey houses built to the depth of a narrow plot, with courtyards behind and balconies over the street. A distinctive society formed around the signares, African and mixed-race women traders who married European merchants under local arrangements and held property and influence of their own.

Saint-Louis became the capital of Senegal and, from 1895, of French West Africa, and one of the four communes whose inhabitants held French citizenship and voted. Under Governor Louis Faidherbe in the 1850s it was the base for the conquest of the river valley, and the town acquired a bridge to the mainland in 1897, a water supply, a hospital and schools. The transfer of the federal capital to Dakar in 1902, and of the Senegalese capital by independence in 1960, ended its primacy, though the town served as the capital of neighbouring Mauritania from 1920 to 1957; the railway and the port went too, and the city settled into a long decline.

What survived was the fabric. The island's grid of merchant houses, largely intact, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2000, and restoration work, tourism, a university founded in 1990 and the jazz festival have given the city a second life. The environment has been less kind: a channel cut through the Langue de Barbarie in 2003 to relieve flooding widened into a permanent breach that has reshaped the river mouth and forced coastal communities to move.

Saint-Louis carries itself as a former capital. Old families take pride in the city's manners, its French-speaking schooling and its signare inheritance, and the fanals — huge illuminated lanterns, built as models of ships and houses and carried through the streets at Christmas — descend directly from that world. The mixture of a Muslim majority and an old Catholic community is visible in the calendar, with Tabaski and Christmas both marked publicly.

Music is the city's modern signature. The jazz festival, running since 1993, fills the island with concerts and street stages each year and has made Saint-Louis a fixture on the West African music circuit; local groups mix jazz with Wolof and Pulaar traditions, and the bars on the island keep live music going outside the festival.

Guet Ndar is a world of its own: a tightly packed Wolof fishing community whose men crew pirogues far down the coast and into Mauritanian waters, whose women run the trade in fresh, dried and smoked fish, and whose disputes over fishing rights are national news. Across the city, the ordinary Senegalese courtesies hold — long greetings, tea in three rounds, eating from a shared bowl — and hospitality towards visitors is a point of local pride rather than a service.

About 250,000 people live in the city, most of them on the mainland at Sor rather than on the island, which has a few thousand residents and a growing number of restored houses used as guesthouses. Guet Ndar, on the spit, is extraordinarily dense, with families squeezed into a narrow strip between the ocean and the river.

Fishing is the largest employer and the most contested activity: catches have fallen, competition with foreign industrial fleets is bitterly resented, and agreements governing where Saint-Louis crews may fish in Mauritanian waters shape household incomes. Beyond it, the economy is the university and its students, administration, the hospital, irrigated agriculture along the river, tourism concentrated on the island, and the Greater Tortue Ahmeyim gas project on the maritime boundary with Mauritania.

Days begin before dawn on the beach, when the pirogues go out, and the city slows at midday for the main meal. The pressing problems are coastal erosion and flooding: the breach in the Langue de Barbarie has swallowed houses and forced the relocation of families to sites inland, the island's older buildings need expensive repair, and unemployment pushes young men towards the pirogue crossing to the Canary Islands.

Saint-Louis claims ceebu jën as its own invention, the dish of fish stuffed with a herb paste and simmered with tomato, cassava, carrot and cabbage, served over broken rice cooked in the same sauce. The local version is argued over in detail — the cut of fish, the depth of the tomato, the crust of rice at the bottom of the pot — and it is eaten at midday from a shared platter.

The sea supplies the rest. Fish from Guet Ndar is grilled whole over charcoal or cooked as yassa with lemon, mustard and onions, and the drying racks on the spit produce the salted and fermented ingredients that season sauces across Senegal, including yeet, a fermented sea snail with a pungent smell and a deep flavour. Upriver farming adds rice from the irrigated fields and vegetables, while the Fula herders of the valley bring kossam, soured milk, drunk plain or poured over millet couscous.

Lakh, millet porridge with sweetened curds, is the everyday sweet dish, and street stalls sell ndambé bean stew in a baguette, accara fritters and fataya pastries. Drinks are bissap from hibiscus, bouye from baobab fruit, ginger juice and ataya tea poured in three rounds; the island's bars and restaurants, developed around the festival, are the main place in the north where wine and beer are part of an evening out.