Banjul is one of Africa's smallest and most unusual capitals: a pocket-sized city stretched across a sandy island at the mouth of the Gambia River, with a handful of colonial streets, a big, bustling market and a slightly sleepy air that makes it feel more like a large town than a national capital. The British founded it in 1816 under the name Bathurst, and for a century and a half it was the colony's administrative heart. It still has wooden houses with verandas, churches and mosques, and echoes of the time when it was a key port in the effort to suppress the Atlantic slave trade.
Today Banjul has handed everyday life over to neighbouring Serekunda and the tourist coast, but it's still the centre of power. Here you'll find State House, the ministries, the port and Albert Market, and here stands the monumental Arch 22, the triumphal gateway that dominates the entrance to the city. It's a place to wander without hurrying: browse the market, climb the arch to see the city from above and stop at the National Museum to understand where this small country, curled around its river, comes from.
This guide takes a practical look at Banjul: what to see on the island, what admission to Arch 22 and the museum costs, how to get there from the coast, where to eat and how to combine your visit with the ferry to Barra or the beaches of Kololi and Bakau. With a well-planned half day, the Gambian capital reveals its quiet charm and rich history, very different from the tourist bustle of the coast.
Banjul was born in 1816, when the British captain Alexander Grant founded a military and trading post on St Mary's Island, at the mouth of the Gambia River, to control shipping and help suppress the slave trade after the British Empire abolished it. He named it Bathurst, after the Colonial Secretary Henry Bathurst, and laid out its streets in a grid named after generals from Waterloo. It was the capital of the British colony and protectorate of The Gambia, and in 1965 of independent Gambia. In 1973 it took back an African name, Banjul. Its story, from anti-slavery outpost to tiny capital of a nation curled around its river, is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The urban heart of Gambia: a tiny capital born as an anti-slavery fort on a river island, and the bustle of Serekunda and Bakau around it.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Banjul's story begins long before the city itself, with the unusual geography that gave it a reason to exist. The Gambia is an extraordinary country: a narrow strip of land wrapped around both banks of the Gambia River, one of the most navigable rivers in West Africa, whose wide estuary lets ocean-going ships sail hundreds of kilometres inland. Whoever controlled the mouth of the river controlled the trade of the whole region. And at that mouth, where the Gambia opens onto the Atlantic, lay a low, flat sandbank: the island of Banjul, which the Portuguese had named Santa Maria centuries earlier.
According to tradition, the name 'Banjul' comes from the Mandinka language: it is said that plant fibres ('bang julo') grew on the island and were used to make ropes and mats, and that the gatherers answered 'bang julo' when asked what they were doing there. The island was home to fishermen and covered in mangroves and mosquitoes, an inhospitable place that for centuries was little more than a stopover in the great river trade. The Portuguese, and later English and French traders, had frequented the Gambia River since the 15th century, drawn first by gold, ivory and beeswax, and above all, in the centuries that followed, by the Atlantic slave trade, which tore hundreds of thousands of Africans from these lands.
At the height of the slave trade, the European hub on the river was not Banjul but places further upstream such as James Island (today Kunta Kinteh Island) and the settlements of Albreda and Juffureh. Santa Maria Island was still almost empty when, in the early 19th century, a historic shift in British policy suddenly pulled it out of obscurity and turned it into the key to the river.
In 1807, the British Empire abolished the slave trade and, soon after, began actively hunting slave ships along the coasts of West Africa. To watch over the mouth of the Gambia River and cut off the illegal trade that other powers were still carrying on, the Crown needed a military base at a strategic point. In 1816, Captain Alexander Grant, a British commander, negotiated with the King of Kombo for the cession of Santa Maria Island, and on 23 April that year he took possession of it to build a fort and a settlement.
Grant named the new town Bathurst, after Henry Bathurst, the earl who was then Secretary of State for the Colonies. He laid out its streets in a neat grid and named them after allied generals from the Battle of Waterloo, fought just a year earlier. Fort Bullen was built to arm the mouth of the river, and Bathurst soon attracted traders, soldiers, officials and, most notably, Africans freed from intercepted slave ships: many of these 'recaptives' —together with Creoles from Sierra Leone, known as the Akus— settled in the town and formed an influential community of craftsmen, traders and clergy.
The city was thus born with a double mark: it was both an instrument of British colonial power and a refuge for Africans rescued from slavery. Bathurst grew as a trading port —exporting mainly groundnuts, which would become The Gambia's great cash crop— and as the administrative centre of an increasingly defined British possession. In 1889, the borders of the Gambia colony and protectorate were fixed in the strange elongated shape they have today, the result of negotiations between Britain and France, whose colony of Senegal surrounded the territory on every side.
For more than a century, Bathurst was the undisputed centre of Gambian life: port, market, seat of the colonial government and home to a society that was cosmopolitan for its size. In 1855 the Albert Market opened, named after Queen Victoria's prince consort; it became the colony's great trading hub and is still the commercial heart of the city today. Churches, mosques and government buildings went up, along with the distinctive two-storey wooden houses with verandas and iron balconies, many of which still survive, weathered, in the old town.
The economy revolved around groundnuts (peanuts), grown inland by Mandinka, Wolof and Fula farmers and shipped to Europe through the port of Bathurst. The city was home to Lebanese and European traders, the British administration and the prosperous Aku community, while most of the country's population lived in the villages of the protectorate, upriver. Bathurst was a small but lively capital, with newspapers, clubs, an active civic life and an urban identity all its own.
In the 20th century, and especially after the two World Wars —in which Gambian soldiers fought for the Crown— nationalist feeling and the demand for self-government grew. Figures such as Edward Francis Small, a pioneering trade unionist and journalist, and later Dawda Jawara, a vet trained in the United Kingdom, led the colony's politics. Unlike other African territories, The Gambia's path to independence was peaceful and gradual, negotiated rather than seized by force.
On 18 February 1965, The Gambia became independent from the United Kingdom, with Bathurst as its capital and Dawda Jawara as prime minister; in 1970 the country became a republic and Jawara its first president. The small nation, the smallest in mainland Africa, bet on stability, parliamentary democracy and an economy based on groundnuts and, increasingly, on the sun-and-beach tourism that was starting to draw Europeans to its Atlantic coast.
One of the most symbolic gestures of the new era came in 1973, when the city dropped its colonial name, Bathurst, and took the African name Banjul, reviving the island's old Mandinka name. It was an assertion of national identity, part of the wave of 'Africanisation' of names that swept the continent after independence. Banjul, however, remained a capital hemmed in by its geography: shut in on a low island with almost no room to grow, it began losing population and energy to towns on the mainland, above all Serekunda and the Kombo coastal strip, where residential neighbourhoods, shops and hotels were flourishing.
In 1981 an attempted coup shook the country and was put down with help from Senegal, which led to a short-lived confederation between the two countries, Senegambia, dissolved in 1989. The real break came in 1994: on 22 July, a group of young officers led by Lieutenant Yahya Jammeh overthrew Jawara in a bloodless coup, ending almost three decades of civilian rule.
To commemorate the coup of 22 July 1994, Yahya Jammeh's new regime had the city's most imposing monument built: Arch 22, a huge 35-metre triumphal gateway, opened in 1996, that dominates the entrance to Banjul from the mainland. With its panoramic terrace and small museum, the arch is now the capital's most photographed landmark, even though its origins recall an authoritarian era: Jammeh ruled with an iron fist for 22 years, marked by political repression, disappearances and international isolation, until he lost the election of December 2016.
That result triggered a dramatic crisis: Jammeh refused to accept defeat by Adama Barrow, and only pressure from the international community and the intervention of ECOWAS troops (the Economic Community of West African States) forced him, in January 2017, to give up power and go into exile. Barrow's arrival opened a new democratic chapter, with more freedoms and a transitional justice process to shed light on the abuses of the previous regime.
Today Banjul is a quiet capital, almost provincial in scale, that has handed the hustle and bustle over to Serekunda and the tourist coast, but it keeps its institutional weight and a unique historic atmosphere: the Albert Market, the wooden colonial houses, the National Museum, 22nd July Square and, crowning it all, Arch 22. It is a city to explore slowly on foot, reading in its streets the history of a small, singular country, born of the fight against slavery and coiled, like a thin snake, around its great river.
