AT A GLANCE
Why go?
On a plateau in the Central River Region of The Gambia, the Wassu Stone Circles raise rings of laterite pillars that have stood for nearly a thousand years. Part of the UNESCO World Heritage property "Stone Circles of Senegambia," Wassu is one of the densest and most accessible concentrations of these megalithic monuments anywhere in the world, and the site where the tallest of all the stones was found.↗↗
Eleven stone circles and their associated frontal stones make up the Wassu complex, each ring formed of between eight and fourteen dressed pillars set four to six metres across. The builders quarried the iron-rich laterite with metal tools and shaped it into almost identical cylindrical and polygonal columns averaging about two metres tall and weighing up to seven tons—an effort that speaks to a prosperous, well-organised society that kept this burial tradition alive for centuries.↗↗
A sacred landscape along the River Gambia
Wassu sits within a vast sacred landscape that grew over more than 1,500 years. Along a band roughly 350 km long and 100 km wide tracing the River Gambia, four great groups of circles—Sine Ngayène and Wanar in Senegal, Wassu and Kerbatch in The Gambia—together contain over 1,000 monuments, 93 stone circles, and countless burial mounds, or tumuli. Inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2006, this is the largest concentration of stone circles known on earth, and Wassu is its Gambian showpiece.