The Gambia: Eight Attractions and Natural Wonders

A river with a country around it

The Gambia is the smallest country on mainland Africa — a ribbon of land, rarely more than 50 kilometres wide, following the River Gambia inland for about 480 kilometres and surrounded on three sides by Senegal. Most of its 2.7 million people live near the coast, around the capital Banjul and the much larger town of Serekunda. It is flat, hot, and English-speaking, with a long tradition of package tourism from northern Europe in the cool, dry winter — earning it the nickname "the smiling coast" — and superb birdlife: well over 500 species in a tiny area.

The eight below run from the Atlantic beaches up the river. The dry season (November to mid-April) is the time to go; the rains from July to September are heavy and many upriver lodges close.

1. The River Gambia and River Gambia National Park

The river is the country's spine and its best attraction — a highway of brown water, mangrove tunnels, and creeks (bolongs) alive with kingfishers, herons, fish eagles, and, in the lower reaches, the occasional hippo and West African manatee. Midway upstream, the River Gambia National Park protects the "Baboon Islands", where the Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Project has returned orphaned and confiscated chimps to the wild since 1979; you cannot land, but boats pass close.

Multi-day river cruises and stays at riverside camps like Tendaba are the way to experience it.

2. Kunta Kinteh Island

This small, eroding island near the river mouth held a fort fought over by the Portuguese, British, and French, and used for centuries in the transatlantic slave trade. Renamed in 2011 after the ancestor in Alex Haley's Roots, it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site along with related sites on the banks — the ruined warehouses at Albreda, the "Freedom Flagpole" at Juffureh, and a museum in a former trading house.

It is visited by boat from Banjul or on a "Roots" day tour, often combined with Juffureh village.

3. Kachikally Crocodile Pool

In the coastal town of Bakau, a spring-fed pool in a patch of sacred forest is home to around 100 well-fed Nile crocodiles, tended by a local family and used for centuries in fertility and blessing rituals. Habituated to people, some of the larger animals can be approached and even touched under guidance. A small museum covers Gambian traditional culture and the juju beliefs attached to the site.

It is a short taxi ride from the tourist strip and usually combined with the Bakau craft market.

4. Abuko Nature Reserve

Abuko, only about 20 minutes from the coast, is a small but exceptional reserve of riverine gallery forest and savanna along a stream. A shaded loop trail passes a crocodile pool, hides overlooking the water, and an animal-rescue enclosure, with excellent chances of seeing colobus and green monkeys, monitor lizards, and a long list of forest birds — hornbills, turacos, kingfishers — in a couple of hours.

It makes an easy half-day and a good introduction to Gambian wildlife.

5. Bijilo Forest Park

Right next to the Senegambia hotel strip, Bijilo (officially the Monkey Park) is a small coastal woodland of rhun palms and scrub with a network of walkways. Callithrix (green) monkeys, red colobus, and patas monkeys are used to visitors — feeding them is discouraged — and the ocean-side path gives a break from the beach. Birdlife is good in the early morning.

An hour or so is enough; it is walkable from most Kololi hotels.

6. The Wassu stone circles

Near Kuntaur, on the north bank of the river well upstream, stand the finest of the roughly 1,000 stone circles scattered across the Gambia–Senegal border region. Built between the 3rd century BC and the 16th century AD over burial mounds, the Wassu group has stones up to two and a half metres tall, quarried and shaped from laterite; a small museum explains the little that is known. It forms part of the Senegambia UNESCO World Heritage Site.

It is a long drive or a river-cruise stop, usually paired with the Baboon Islands.

7. Tanji and the fishing coast

Tanji, south of the resorts, is the busiest working fishing village on the coast: long painted pirogues run up onto the sand, women crowd the waterline to buy and smoke fish, and the noise and colour are constant, especially late afternoon when the boats come in. There is a village museum of Gambian rural life and, just offshore, the Bijol Islands bird reserve.

Further south are the quieter beaches of Gunjur and Kartong, near the Senegal border.

8. Serekunda, Banjul, and the coast

Serekunda, the largest town, has the country's biggest and most chaotic market — cloth, produce, hardware, everything. Nearby Banjul, the small capital on an island at the river mouth, has the Arch 22 monument, a modest national museum, the Albert Market, and the Cape Point lighthouse. The tourist heart, though, is the Kololi–Senegambia strip: a string of beach hotels, bars, and craft stalls where most visitors are based.

It is the easiest base, with the airport, the resorts, and day trips to everything above.

The Gambia is compact and low-cost. Many visitors stay a week on the coast with a day trip or two; adding an upriver cruise or a few nights at Tendaba or a Baboon Islands camp turns it into a proper birding and river trip of 10 days or more.