Old Towns of Djenné
The number of Wikipedia languages with an article is our measure of how widely known a site is. Counts of visitors and wishes will appear once enough people use the app.
Seals, want-to-go and the year you stood here are recorded in the iPhone app.
How it came to be
Djenné, about 130 km south-west of Mopti in Mali, has been inhabited since about 250 BC. Excavations from 1977 at four nearby sites, including Djenné-Djeno, found material going back to the 3rd century BC. The town grew into a market and a link in the trans-Saharan gold trade.
In the 15th and 16th centuries Djenné was one of the centres from which Islam spread. Nearly 2,000 traditional earthen houses survive in the 48.5-hectare old town, built on raised mounds called toguere to keep them above the seasonal floods. The great earthen mosque was rebuilt in 1906-1907.
Mali first nominated Djenné in 1979 and was asked to add the surrounding archaeological sites. The town and four sites were inscribed in 1988. It has been on the List of World Heritage in Danger since 2016.
Data: Wikidata (CC0). Photos: Wikimedia Commons, under each photo’s license. Prototype; may contain errors. We measure usage anonymously to improve the app (PostHog, EU).