Lake Retba, better known as Lac Rose or the Pink Lake, is a pink-water lagoon about 35 km northeast of Dakar, cut off from the Atlantic by a strip of dunes. Its colour, which ranges from mauve to deep pink depending on the light and the season, comes from a microscopic alga (Dunaliella salina) that thrives in its hypersaline water and produces a reddish pigment. It is one of Senegal's most famous postcard views.
The lake is extremely salty, close to the Dead Sea, so you can float without any effort. Along its shores hundreds of salt collectors, men and women, work by hand. They protect their skin with shea butter, break blocks of salt from the lake bed and pile them in white pyramids on the shore. For years the Pink Lake was also the legendary finish line of the Dakar Rally, back when the race ended on its dunes.
This guide covers the practical side of visiting Lake Retba: how to get there from Dakar and what it costs, what to do (pirogue rides, floating in the water, 4x4 or quad trips across the dunes, visits to the salt flats and the villages), when it looks pinkest, where to eat and sleep, and answers to common questions. It's also worth knowing what state the lake is in, because its colour and salinity have varied in recent years.
Lake Retba is an old coastal lagoon that the dunes cut off from the ocean. Under the Sahel sun, evaporation concentrated the salt to extreme levels, and the alga that turns the water pink took hold. People have harvested its salt by hand for decades, and it became famous as the finish line of the Paris-Dakar Rally. Today it is one of the country's great natural icons and a candidate for World Heritage status. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Cape Verde peninsula, Africa's westernmost point: Dakar, a vibrant and cosmopolitan capital; Gorée, an island that keeps the memory of the slave trade; the pink lake of Retba, and coastal villages of Lebou fishermen and artists' retreats.
Read the history of Dakar and the coast →A local guide tells you in half an hour what no sign at the site will ever explain. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have 7 activities in Dakar. And there are free tours here: you book without paying and tip the guide whatever you think at the end, so trying one costs you nothing. Have a look below: tap any of them to see them all.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Just over half an hour from Dakar, after crossing the suburbs and the vegetable fields of the Niayes, a sheet of water suddenly appears that looks like it belongs on another planet: a pink lake, sometimes mauve, sometimes strawberry, separated from the Atlantic by little more than a strip of golden dunes. This is Lake Retba, known around the world as Lac Rose or the Pink Lake, one of Senegal's great natural icons and one of the most widely reproduced postcards of the country.
The secret of its colour is not some quirk of a mineral, but life itself. A microscopic alga, Dunaliella salina, thrives in the lake's hypersaline waters, able to survive in conditions that would kill almost any other organism. To protect itself from the intense solar radiation, this alga produces a reddish pigment, beta-carotene, which in high concentrations tints the water pink. The colour grows stronger under the midday sun, when the wind blows and salinity is at its peak, and fades during the rainy season.
The key to the whole phenomenon is salt. Lake Retba is an old coastal lagoon that was cut off from the ocean by advancing dunes. Under the relentless Sahel sun, the water evaporates constantly and the salt concentrates until it reaches around 380 grams per litre in the densest areas, a salinity comparable to that of the Dead Sea and far higher than the open sea. That extreme concentration is what lets you float effortlessly, what feeds the alga that gives the lake its colour, and what has sustained, for decades, an entire human economy along its shores.
The Pink Lake is not just a natural spectacle: above all, it is a workplace. Every day, hundreds of men head out onto the brackish water in pirogues, use poles to break loose the blocks of salt on the lake bed, and load them into baskets that are then piled into dazzling pyramids along the shore. The women take charge of carrying and sorting the salt on land. It is gruelling work under the sun, in water so corrosive that the harvesters coat their bodies in shea butter to protect their skin from sores.
Salt harvesting at Lake Retba intensified after the great Sahel droughts of the 1970s and 1980s, which pushed many Senegalese from the interior towards this source of income. Over time, it also drew workers from neighbouring countries such as Mali, Guinea and Burkina Faso, who founded small villages around the lake. Today tens of thousands of tonnes of salt are extracted from it every year, much of it used to preserve fish —a pillar of the Senegalese diet and economy— and exported to other countries in the region.
That human dimension is inseparable from the landscape: the white pyramids of salt standing out against the pink water, the silhouettes of the harvesters in the lake, the bustle of baskets on the shore. Visiting the Pink Lake also means getting a glimpse of a demanding, age-old form of manual labour that feeds entire communities, and that explains why this spot, beyond its photogenic beauty, holds such a concrete place in the country's economic life.
For almost three decades, the name of this lake was tied to one of the most famous sporting adventures in the world: the Paris-Dakar Rally. Born in 1978 from an idea by driver Thierry Sabine, who had got lost in the Libyan desert and fallen under its spell, the rally crossed the Sahara from Europe to the Senegalese capital, and its finish line was set right on the dunes and beach beside the Pink Lake. Getting there, after thousands of kilometres of sand and breakdowns, was the dream of every car, motorbike and truck driver who dared to take on the race.
Lake Retba thus became a legendary place for motorsport fans all over the planet. Images of the dusty convoy coming down the dunes towards the pink water, through the crowds, went around the world every January and forever linked this corner of Senegal with the epic of the rally. For many Senegalese, the arrival of the Dakar was also a big celebration and a driver of tourism and the local economy.
In 2008, the planned edition was cancelled due to security threats in Mauritania, and from 2009 the race moved to South America and, later, to Saudi Arabia, bringing the African era to an end. The rally keeps the name 'Dakar' even though it no longer sets foot in Senegal, and the lake retains the aura of that time: local guides tell visitors the story of the race, and driving the final stretch over the dunes to the beach by 4x4 or quad bike is still, for many, a way to relive the legend.
The Pink Lake is also a fragile, ever-changing ecosystem, and its recent history proves it. The colour, the salinity and even the water level fluctuate with the seasons, the rains and human activity. In some periods, especially after years of heavy rainfall or inflows of fresh water, the characteristic pink hue has faded almost to nothing, disappointing visitors who arrived expecting the classic postcard. The phenomenon depends on a delicate balance: if salinity drops, the alga that gives the colour stops thriving.
In 2022, exceptional rains and flooding seriously disrupted the lake: the water level rose, the salinity was diluted and salt harvesting was interrupted for months, with a heavy impact on the communities that depend on it. Episodes like this are a reminder that Lake Retba is not an unchanging backdrop, but a living natural system, sensitive to the climate and to pressure from tourism, urbanisation and infrastructure projects on the growing outskirts of Dakar.
Senegal has put forward Lake Retba and its surroundings as a candidate for the Unesco World Heritage List, in recognition of both its natural uniqueness and the salt culture that surrounds it. The challenge is to preserve the balance that makes this place unique: protecting the salinity and the landscape, managing tourism and safeguarding the livelihoods of the harvesters. Meanwhile, the Pink Lake keeps drawing travellers from all over the world who come to float in its incredible waters, see the salt pyramids standing out against the raspberry-coloured water and set foot, by the sea, on the finish line of a legendary race.
