Bassari Country
The number of Wikipedia languages with an article is our measure of how widely known a site is. How many people have stood at a site or want to go will be shown once enough people use the app.
Seals, your want-to-go list and the year you stood here are kept in the iPhone app.
How it came to be
Bassari Country is a cultural landscape in south-eastern Senegal, near the borders with Mali and Guinea, at the northern foothills of the Fouta Djallon massif. It has three areas: Bassari–Salémata, Bedik–Bandafassi and Fula–Dindéfello. The Bassari, Fula and Bedik peoples settled here between the 11th and 19th centuries and adapted farming and herding to limited resources.
The Bassari landscape has terraces and rice paddies, with villages, hamlets and archaeological sites scattered among them. Until the last century villages stood on rises overlooking the plains, with round thatched huts around a central open space. Bedik villages are dense clusters of huts with steep thatched roofs.
Today Bassari settlements are dispersed near the fields, and the old villages are used only for rituals and festivals. Crop rotation, manuring, communal sowing, weeding and harvesting, along with sacred forests and sanctuaries, have shaped how the land is used. It was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 2012.
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).