Dakar, Senegal

DAKAR, SENEGAL | "Teranga — The City That Welcomes"

Dakar is the westernmost city in Africa and the most culturally vibrant capital on the continent's Atlantic coast. A densely packed peninsula of two million people where the terracotta walls of the Médina, the brilliant painted pirogues of the fishing villages, and the iron balconies of the colonial Plateau neighborhood exist within a few kilometers of each other in one of the most visually saturated cities in West Africa. The city sits at the edge of the Cap-Vert peninsula on the southernmost tip of the Sahel, giving it a coastal Atlantic light that is cooler and cleaner than the rest of the West African coast and that makes the ochre and coral buildings glow in the morning hours.

The colors are specific and irreducible: the deep terracotta and coral of the Médina walls in morning light, the cobalt blue of the painted pirogues against the pale Atlantic surf, the brilliant saffron of the Mouride brotherhood fabrics in the market stalls, and the deep violet of a Dakar sunset over the open ocean. It is a palette that exists nowhere else in Africa and that shifts entirely between the harmattan dust season and the clean bright months of the short rains.