Mermoz

Mermoz is the university, the fish canteens and ten minutes from the corniche. The Cheikh Anta Diop campus is just across the boulevard, so the district filled with students: rooms rented in villas, photocopiers, internet cafés, and restaurants where a full thiéboudieune costs fifteen hundred francs, served in a shared dish with one spoon each.

It is quiet in the morning, gridlocked at midday, lively in the evening. It hangs off three roads: the VDN along its eastern edge, avenue Cheikh Anta Diop running down towards the centre, and the Ouakam road climbing to the Mamelles hills. In between are low 1980s villas, recent four-storey buildings, courtyards planted with mango trees, and the small Mermoz market where the same women have held the same pitches for twenty years.

What makes the address worth having is its position: ten minutes from the western corniche and its outdoor gyms, five from Sacré-Cœur and its offices, fifteen from the Plateau outside peak hours, twenty from the Almadies. The Mamelles lighthouse and the Renaissance Monument stand two kilometres away, on the two hills you can see from nearly every terrace.

This is a district of people who stay: teachers, professionals, settled families, students who come back each year. For a stay it is probably Dakar's best compromise between price, relative quiet and distance from everything else — provided you accept the horns on the VDN and the fact that no window here looks out to sea.

For day-to-day life Mermoz is well equipped: the market in the morning, two mini-markets on the VDN, corner shops open until midnight, two bakeries that pull bread out at six, and Senegalese restaurants where a plate runs around fifteen hundred francs. The university pulls rents down and fills the district with rooms in family houses: it is one of the few addresses in Dakar where a family and a student can look on the same street without either of them being in the wrong neighbourhood.