Liberté 6

Liberté 6 is a district of blocks and families, built by the SICAP housing agency in the 1970s for salaried middle-class households, and it has stayed precisely that. The streets carry numbers, the buildings have three floors and a courtyard, children play football between parked cars, and everyone knows the shopkeeper — the corner boutique, open from six in the morning to midnight, giving credit in a notebook.

You come here to eat. In the evening the dibiteries set up on the pavements of the Front de Terre and the VDN: mutton cut with a knife, onions, mustard, bread, five thousand francs for three people, and a queue until eleven. The Liberté 6 market, smaller than Castors next door, covers the day's fish and vegetables. The VDN's fast-food places and tea rooms take over afterwards.

The address is a practical one too: this is the middle of the peninsula, meaning twenty minutes from the Plateau, fifteen from the Almadies, ten from the Léopold Sédar Senghor stadium, with the VDN and the Front de Terre to get out in either direction. Offices have started moving into converted villas, and duty pharmacies are plentiful.

It is not a pretty district and does not pretend to be: no view, few trees, traffic noise, water cuts in the hot season. It is a place where people actually live, at a price with no relation to the corniche, and where a solo traveller or a family will go unnoticed in the good sense.

At weekends the courtyards turn into function rooms: tarpaulins strung up, plastic chairs hired by the hundred, a speaker on a stool, and a sheep in the yard since morning for a naming ceremony. If you are staying here on a Saturday you will be invited — refuse politely twice, accept the third time, that is the protocol, and you will be served before everyone else because you are the guest. The district is also full of private schools and clinics, which explains the traffic between seven and eight.