Yoff

Yoff is a Lébou fishing village that became a district of a hundred thousand people without ever stopping being a village. The beach is its centre: three kilometres of sand with pirogues drawn up by the dozen, fish sold the moment the boats land, wrestlers training in the late afternoon and whole families walking on Sundays. Football is played on the hard sand at low tide, and nobody keeps score.

Yoff is also a religious capital. It is here, at Yoff Layène, that Seydina Limamou Laye — founder of the Layène brotherhood in 1883 — was born and is buried; his white mausoleum at the water's edge receives visitors all year, and the annual Appel de Seydina Limamou gathers tens of thousands of followers dressed in white. The sea cemetery beside it runs down to the sand.

The Lébou community still runs the district through its own institutions — the council of elders, the rules for sharing the sea — and practises the ndeup, a drum healing ceremony that can last several days and is not something to watch as a tourist without being invited.

For a stay, Yoff has two concrete advantages: the beach on foot, and the wide access roads inherited from the old Léopold Sédar Senghor airport next door. The drawbacks are those of a dense village: sandy lanes, water that comes and goes, and a beach that is neither supervised nor always clean by the end of the day.

Yoff is also the city's northern gateway, and it shows: the roads climbing to the VDN are heavy in the morning, and sellers of dried fish, mangoes and charcoal hold the junctions all day. On Sunday mornings the beach becomes a stadium — wrestling clubs, footballers of every age, walkers, whole families come to eat on the sand — and it is the best moment for understanding the district. Bring closed shoes for the lanes: the sand gets everywhere, including indoors.