Senegal

Dakar ends at the sea and does not apologise for it - a city that has always faced outward, always traded, always absorbed and returned. Teranga is the word for hospitality here, but it functions less like a custom and more like a structural principle: you will be fed, included, looked after. The music alone - mbalax, the griots, the drumming that travels through walls - is reason enough to come.

Our guide is being written from the ground up, with the time this place deserves.

We are still gathering the notes that make a guide worth keeping: Saint-Louis guesthouses, Dakar's fish markets, desert crossings and the teleboutiques where the best thieboudienne is never on any list.