The Bagre and the Mali djinnLegend Timbuktu was never a myth: it was a real city of gold, salt and above all BOOKS, where by the 1500s scholars at Sankore copied and traded hundreds of thousands of manuscripts on astronomy, medicine and law. When jihadists... Open it on the map · Read the story
The Bandiagara EscarpmentLegend The cliff runs 150 kilometres and stands 500 metres over the sand flats, with villages built into the base of it and, higher up the rock face, older dwellings and burial chambers cut by the Tellem, who were here before the Dogon... Open it on the map · Read the story
The Dogon and SiriusLegend The Dogon of Mali hold an elaborate cosmology recorded by French anthropologists in the 1930s and 40s, and one claim made them famous: that they knew of an invisible companion star to Sirius long before Western telescopes... Open it on the map · Read the story
The Great Mosque of DjennéLegend The largest mud-brick building in the world, raised on the Bani floodplain out of sun-baked earth bricks called ferey, with sand and earth mortar and a plaster skin. A building like that would dissolve in a few rainy seasons if... Open it on the map · Read the story
Every one of these is sourced
Each entry links to the record it came from. Access rules, permits and land status vary by country and are noted where the source states them, check locally before you go.
