Gao, on the banks of the Niger River at the edge of the Sahara, was the capital of one of the greatest empires in African history: the Songhai Empire, which in the 15th and 16th centuries ruled a vast territory of West Africa, heir to and surpassing the empires of Ghana and Mali. From that splendour an extraordinary monument still stands over the city: the Tomb of Askia, a 17-metre stepped mud pyramid bristling with wooden stakes, which is at once an imperial tomb, a mosque and the symbol of an entire people.
A Songhai city par excellence, a river port and an old caravan crossroads, Gao holds the memory of legendary kings such as Sonni Ali and, above all, Askia Muhammad, the great emperor who had the tomb built after his pilgrimage to Mecca. Around it, the Niger, the pink dunes and the markets made up a Sahelian landscape of enormous power, and the city was one of the stops for travellers venturing into northern Mali.
But let's be blunt: today Gao is not a tourist destination but a city in a war zone. It was occupied by jihadist groups in 2012-2013 and remains one of the most dangerous hotspots in northern Mali, with attacks, kidnappings and fighting. Foreign ministries advise against all travel to Mali. This guide explains, with historical rigour, what Gao is and what it means, without in any way romanticising the idea of visiting it under current conditions: any plan must start from the official advice.
Gao is one of the oldest cities in the Sahel: it was an important trading centre and the capital of the kingdom of Gao (Kawkaw) as early as the first millennium, and later the heart of the Songhai Empire, which under Sonni Ali and Askia Muhammad became the largest state in the history of West Africa. Around 1495, Askia Muhammad had the Tomb of Askia built, the great mud pyramid that still stands today as the only monumental testimony of the empire. The Moroccan invasion of 1591 brought the Songhai to an end. Its full story is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Legendary Timbuktu of the 333 saints, Gao of the Songhai askias and the Tuareg dunes of the Festival au Désert: the great north of gold, learning and desert blues.
Read the history of The Saharan north: Timbuktu, Gao and the desert →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Gao is one of the oldest cities in the Sahel. Long before it became the capital of the Songhai Empire, it was the centre of a trading kingdom that medieval Arab sources called Kawkaw (or Gao). Set at a strategic point on the Niger River, on the edge of the desert, the city was a natural end point for the caravan routes that crossed the Sahara: gold from the south, salt from the desert mines, enslaved people, dates and goods from the Maghreb all passed through it.
As early as the first millennium of our era there was an important settlement there, and by the 9th–11th centuries the kingdom of Gao was one of the most notable states in West Africa, known to Arab geographers. The archaeological sites in the area, above all Gao-Saney (Sané) a few kilometres away, have revealed the remains of the ancient city and its necropolis, with famous marble funerary stelae and Arabic inscriptions from the 11th–12th centuries. Some of these stelae were imported from Almería, in Al-Andalus, astonishing proof of the long-distance contacts of that Sahelian kingdom.
The rulers of Gao were among the first in the region to adopt Islam, drawn by the faith of the trans-Saharan merchants. For a time the city came under the influence of the Mali Empire at its height, but it kept its identity and its commercial strength. From that ancient, rich and cosmopolitan foundation, the greatest empire West Africa had ever known would emerge in the 15th century.
In the 15th century, taking advantage of the decline of the Mali Empire, the Songhai people of Gao expanded until they had built the largest state in the history of West Africa. The architect of that expansion was King Sonni Ali (who reigned from 1464 to 1492), a relentless conqueror and brilliant strategist who subdued Timbuktu and Djenné and forged an empire along the Niger. Under him, Gao went from the capital of a kingdom to the heart of a continental power.
When Sonni Ali died, one of his generals, Muhammad Ture, seized power and founded a new dynasty, the Askias, taking the title Askia Muhammad (or Askia the Great, who reigned from 1493 to 1528). Under his rule, the Songhai Empire reached its greatest extent and splendour: it stretched from the Atlantic to present-day Niger, controlled the trans-Saharan trade in gold and salt, and protected and funded the great centres of learning, above all the University of Sankoré in Timbuktu, which then enjoyed its golden age.
Askia Muhammad, a devout Muslim, made a famous pilgrimage to Mecca around 1496–1498 with a lavish retinue, returning with the title of caliph of the Sudan and enormous religious prestige. The building of his great monument in Gao is linked to that pilgrimage. The Askia empire set up a complex administration, a professional army and a system of provinces, and was one of the most sophisticated states of its time anywhere in the world.
Around 1495, Emperor Askia Muhammad had the monument built in Gao that is today the symbol of the city and the only surviving structure of the Songhai Empire: the Tomb of Askia. It is a stepped mud-brick (banco) pyramid about 17 metres high, shaped like a truncated pyramid and bristling with bundles of wooden beams — the toron — that stick out from the walls and serve as permanent scaffolding for replastering, the same technique used in the great mosques of Timbuktu and Djenné.
The monument is a masterpiece of Sudano-Sahelian earthen architecture. The complex is not just the pyramid: it includes two flat-roofed mud mosques, a cemetery and an open esplanade for assemblies. The tomb served at once as the emperor's mausoleum, a statement of his power and an emblem of the empire's Islamisation: it joined the religious prestige earned on the pilgrimage with the African monumental tradition. For centuries, the people of Gao maintained the building with its annual replastering, as if tending the memory of their kings.
In 2004, UNESCO inscribed the Tomb of Askia on the World Heritage List, precisely because it is the only surviving monumental testimony of that great empire and an exceptional example of the mud-building tradition of the western Sahel. Together with the cities of Timbuktu and Djenné, it is one of Mali's four UNESCO-listed sites, and Gao's great pride.
The end of the Songhai Empire came abruptly in 1591. The Saadian sultan of Morocco, coveting the wealth of gold and salt, sent an army across the Sahara armed with arquebuses — firearms, revolutionary for the time — under the command of Judar Pasha. At the Battle of Tondibi, near Gao, this relatively small but gunpowder-equipped force defeated the large Songhai army, which fought with spears, bows and cavalry. It was the collapse of the whole empire.
Gao, Timbuktu and Djenné fell under Moroccan rule. The occupation dismantled the Songhai state, scattered its elites and sank the trade and cultural life of the middle Niger. Over time Moroccan power faded into the hands of the arma (descendants of the invading soldiers) and various local chiefs, while trade routes shifted towards the Atlantic coast, where the Europeans operated. Gao entered a long decline and was reduced to a provincial town, far from its former imperial splendour.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the region came under French colonial rule and became part of French Sudan, which at independence in 1960 would become the Republic of Mali. Gao remained one of the main cities of the north, a Niger river port and regional capital, proud of its Songhai past and its great mud pyramid. But the 21st century had a new tragedy in store for it.
In 2012, the rebellion in northern Mali hit Gao head-on. After the advance of the Tuareg MNLA movement and the collapse of the Malian army, the city fell into the hands of jihadist groups: it was MUJAO (Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa), linked to Al-Qaeda, that took control of Gao and imposed a brutal version of Islamic law, with atrocious punishments against the population. The city, the symbolic capital of the north, lived through months of terror.
In January–February 2013, the international military intervention — France's Operation Serval, with support from Chadian and Malian troops — drove the jihadists out of Gao, in some of the hardest fighting of the whole campaign. But liberation did not bring peace. Gao and its region (together with neighbouring Ménaka) became one of the epicentres of jihadist violence in the Sahel, with JNIM (Al-Qaeda) and the Islamic State Sahel Province both active, fighting each other for territory and striking the population and security forces with bombings, mines and attacks.
The withdrawal of the UN mission (MINUSMA) in 2023, the arrival of Russian mercenaries alongside the military junta and the general escalation of the conflict made the situation even worse. In 2025–2026, the jihadist fuel blockade that choked the whole of Mali and a coordinated offensive by armed groups — which in April 2026 attacked places such as Kidal, Gao and the outskirts of Bamako — left the north in a critical situation. Gao, capital of a legendary empire and guardian of the Tomb of Askia, remains trapped in one of Africa's longest and cruellest wars, waiting for better times.
