On my second day in Dakar, I took a day trip to the Île de Gorée, or Goree Island, a tiny island off of the coast of Dakar, just a short ferry ride. (I am going to stick with the English spelling just so I don’t have to keep adding the accents.). Goree Island is small – just over 45 acres – and with a population of less than 2,000 people. It is notable for two things: it’s postcard perfect beauty and its history as a slave trading post. Like the ‘castles’ of Ghana’s Cape Coast, it is another beautiful setting with a grim history. Both are reasons to visit, even if they are uncomfortable bedfellows.
I walked from my hotel to the ferry terminal past some grand buildings from the colonial era.
It is an easy trip to Goree. You might get pressured to take a guide and while that will certainly give you more historical context, it really isn’t necessary. The ferry terminal in Dakar is easy to find and you can buy a ticket there. The ferries leave every 1 -2 hours and the ride back is free.
The harbour of Goree Island
Goree Island was colonized in or about the mid 1400s by the Portuguese, then passed to the Dutch, the Portuguese again, the British, and then the French. It became a trading post for different items, but most notoriously was used as a place to detain enslaved peoples before loading them on to ships and … exporting them. Today there is a ‘slave house’, which contains the cells used to imprison people before leading them out through a door of no return to an uncertain future.
This is similar to the sights I saw in Ghana in 2019. And like the trip to the Cape Coast, I found myself struck by how a place with so much horror in its past can be so beautiful. It seems that places with this history should be forever bleak or barren, but it is the opposite. Lush and green, with all of the buildings painted in bright colors. Flowers spilling over the walls, the sea lapping up on the shore, the sky perfectly blue.
It was a delight to wander around, visiting small art galleries and browsing the crafts for sale at the local market.
It is a real tourist spot. Restaurants full and people splashing in the water. Local women walking around selling pretty fans and jewelry.
As beautiful as it is, there isn’t too much to do there, but enough to keep one occupied for the day. A fort, a few small museums.
As the afternoon wound up I caught a ferry back to the mainland.
Back in Dakar, I walked around a little more before settling back into the restaurant at the Institut Français for a cigar and dinner. (The vegetarian offerings there are dismal, but it is such a pleasant environment, having a cigar with my meal in the garden patio, that I could overlook the ‘vegetarian burger’, which was lettuce, tomato, and onions in a bun.)
An evening wander again proved that the streets of Dakar at night are lively, but I was content to spend a little time on the patio of my room before bed.
