Bamako hides its age well. Under the traffic sit Neolithic cave paintings, a 1640s founding compound in Niaréla, the French governor's ridge palace at Koulouba and the smuggled libraries of Timbuktu — three days of Mali's history, told building by building.
Sandstone escarpment above the Point G plateau where ochre rock paintings and grinding hollows survive from Neolithic Saharan herders. The cliff path starts behind the 1906 Point G hospital, itself a French colonial sanatorium.
The city museum traces Bamako from a Bozo fishing hamlet of some 600 souls in 1883 to a capital of millions, with maps of the Niaré, Touré and Dravé founding families' compounds and photographs of the first French fort.
Bamako's oldest quarter, settled around 1640 by the Soninke hunter Seriba Niaré. The family compound still holds the tombs of the founding lineage, and it was the Niaré chiefs who signed the 1883 treaty handing the town to France.
Holds much of the 377,000 Timbuktu manuscripts moved downriver in 2012-13 to escape the jihadist occupation: Songhai astronomy, Maliki jurisprudence and teaching texts from the 15th-century Sankoré scholars, now being digitised page by page.
Mausoleum and museum for Mali's first president, who declared independence in 1960, was deposed by Moussa Traoré's 1968 coup and died in detention in 1977. Speeches, personal effects and photographs of the short-lived Mali Federation.
Concrete arch and bronze figures raised for the 22 September 1960 declaration of independence. The roundabout became the rallying point of the March 1991 uprising that toppled Traoré, and of the protest marches of 2020.
Terminus of the Dakar–Niger railway, opened here in 1904 and pushed on to Koulikoro by 1906. The colonial hall and cast-iron platform canopy still stand, though scheduled passenger service to Senegal ended in 2018.
Sculpted flame marking the Flamme de la Paix of March 1996, when 3,000 surrendered weapons were burned at Timbuktu to close the first Tuareg rebellion. Plaques carry the terms of the 1992 National Pact that preceded it.
Neo-Gothic cathedral consecrated in 1925 by the White Fathers, its twin towers laid up in laterite block by Malian masons. Inside are memorials to the missionaries of the Sudan vicariate and stained glass installed after 1960.
The Bozo settlement that predates the Niaré arrival, wedged between the old centre and the riverbank. Mud-brick compounds, the former Bozo chief's house and lanes still named for the fish-drying racks that once filled them.
Hilltop palace built 1904-1908 for the French governor of Haut-Sénégal-Niger and seat of every Malian president since; it was stormed in the coups of 1968, 1991 and 2012. The grounds are closed, but the ridge road passes the gates.
Riverside complex named for the Fulani historian who recorded the oral archive of the Macina Empire and coined the line about an old man dying being a library burning. Its plaza faces the Pont des Martyrs of March 1991.