Lac Rose
A salt lagoon behind the dunes, harvested with iron bars — pink when the dry season and the sun agree.
- Nature
- Families
Lake Retba, which everyone calls the Pink Lake, is a three-square-kilometre salt lagoon separated from the Atlantic by a belt of dunes and filao trees. Its salinity — higher than the Dead Sea in places — feeds a micro-algae that reddens the water when the sun is high and the level is low: the colour runs from lilac to raspberry in the dry season and vanishes after heavy rain. Following the 2022 floods the lake stayed green for months. Anyone promising you pink in August does not know this lake.
The real spectacle is the work anyway. Hundreds of harvesters, many of them from Mali or Guinea, wade in chest-deep, their skin coated in shea butter for protection, and break the salt crust on the bottom with an iron bar. They fill flat-bottomed pirogues; the women empty the pirogues basin by basin, carried on the head, and pile the salt into white hills along the shore. The hills dry, then leave by lorry for Casamance and the wider region.
Around it are the dunes, the track down to the ocean that people drive by quad or 4x4, the villages of Niaga and Déni, and the memory of the Paris-Dakar rally, which finished here until 2007 — the old men still describe the bivouac.
It works as a day trip from Dakar, but sleeping here has one advantage: at seven in the morning, before the coaches, there is nothing but the salt, the birds and the sound of iron bars.
A word on swimming, since everyone tries: you float without effort, as in any very saline water, but you do not stay in more than ten minutes — the salt burns the smallest cut and your eyes, and you rinse in fresh water on the way out. The harvesters spend six hours a day in it, which is what the shea butter is for. On the shore you buy salt in bags directly from the women who carried it, for a few hundred francs, and it is the most honest souvenir this place can give you.
Getting there
From central Dakar: 35 km, 1 h to 1 h 15 via Rufisque, Keur Massar and Niaga — the last five kilometres are a sandy track, fine in a normal car in the dry season, less obvious after rain. From AIBD: 55 km, 50 min to 1 h on the motorway then Sangalkam, without crossing Dakar. No useful direct public transport: a taxi for the day from Dakar is negotiated at 25,000-40,000 CFA, waiting time included. Locally, the tracks to the ocean and the villages are done by quad, 4x4 or on foot in the sand.
Coming up
December: the month everyone comes home
From December 1 to December 31, 2026
In December, Senegal changes composition. Flights from Paris, Milan, Madrid, New York and Casablanca land full, families drive to AIBD at three in the morning to collect their own, and houses fill with suitcases of presents. It is the month of weddings — more are held in December than in six ordinary months — of naming ceremonies postponed until the uncle from Milan is back, of housewarmings for homes built at a distance over five years, and of reunions planned since the summer.
In practice that means three things. Airfares double from mid-December. Rooms are booked early, especially in Dakar, Saly and each family's home town. And the roads are heavy at weekends, particularly Dakar-Touba, Dakar-Kaolack and Dakar-Saint-Louis.
It is also the best time of year to be here. The weather is dry, it is twenty-five degrees, the sea is still warm, and the drumming in the courtyards never stops before two in the morning. If you are housing someone coming home — a mother, a brother, cousins passing through — this is the month when nobody forgets to count the beds.
Tabaski: the sheep, the family, the road
From May 15 to May 18, 2027
Tabaski — Eid al-Adha — falls on the 10th of Dhu al-Hijjah, which means around Sunday 16 May 2027. In Senegal the exact date is announced a few days ahead by the religious authorities, and the country sometimes celebrates over two days: it has happened again in recent years, and nobody treats it as a crisis.
It is the most important feast of the year. Every head of household who can afford it buys a sheep — prices have been climbing for weeks, sale yards appear on the waste ground of Dakar, and the national conversation is the going rate for a ram. The day before, tailors deliver in a panic the outfits sewn at the HLM market. On the day itself: open-air morning prayer, the sacrifice, the butchering, grilling all day, visits to neighbours and elders, and the formula repeated from house to house to ask forgiveness.
For a traveller: transport is besieged three days ahead — everyone goes back to the village — banks and public offices close, so do many restaurants, and taxis are scarce on the morning of the feast. On the other hand, if you are staying with someone, you will eat as never before.
