"By the sunny road, I go to Grand-Bassam. Grand-Bassam under the sun, the place of all pleasures," sang Alpha Blondy. The etymology of the toponym Bassam would come from alsam, itself a deformation of alsan, in short "the west" or "the setting", and by extension "the night has come": this name would have been given by the migrant Abourés to the first place on which they would have arrived at dusk, their patriarch having promised them on the way to the exodus that they would settle definitively at the place where they would see the solar disk disappear into the sea. Daughter of water and wind, Bassam appears as a place where the past and the present, modernity and ancestral beliefs, collide. The consumerist hedonism whose high mass is played every weekend on the seafront and in the clear waves of the coastline, coexists with ancestral beliefs that lend faith to the whispering of the spirits, in the old abandoned buildings that the residents say are haunted, or near the ocean, in invocations to Mami Wata.After noon on Saturday, vehicles from Abidjan quickly clogged the road leading to the first seaside resort of Côte d'Ivoire, 40 km southeast of Abidjan. Concerts of horns, woro-woro free-riders sneaking on the side of the road, enjailment boros on the roof of minibuses pour every weekend the floods of a tumultuous youth on the edge of the Bassamese beaches. Overrun on weekends, deserted during the week outside vacations, Grand-Bassam is a seaside city very pleasant to discover, with its line of coconut trees on its beautiful beach, its alleys lined with tourist shops and its colonial district France classified by Unesco to discover. The city of the four winds" has known a golden age of tourism that is no longer today. If Bassam is very busy during the day on weekends, hotels are now struggling to maintain themselves in favor of Assinie, in full tourist emulation and few addresses are well maintained In 2017, the city hosted the fabulous "Inside Out" project by French artist JR, which took shape by collaging 250 black and white portraits of Bassamois on the walls of the France district. The idea: to show the living behind the damaged stones, and highlight the pride and joy of a city certainly weakened by successive crises and the attack of March 13, 2016 perpetrated by AQIM took the lives of 22 people, but which advances and continues to fight despite everything. The same year, another open-air photo exhibition, "Bazouam, gallery on the road," aimed to draw public attention to the plight of the men and women of the craft village located at the entrance to the city, seriously impacted in their activity by the opening of the Abidjan-Bassam highway, which diverts tourists from their stands. An initiative of artists Armand Gauz and Dorris Haron Kasco, "Bazouam" ("Help me carry my load on my head" in N'zima) has deployed two months of large portraits of artisans stretched on waterproof canvas between two trunks of coconut trees, and arranged every 100 m on either side of the road. The goal: to force people to stop and put a face on all these anonymous creators, while promoting their work. "Grand-Bassam is a city that does not want to die!"

What to visit Grand-Bassam?

Weather at the moment

Loading...
Organize your trip with our partners Grand-Bassam
Transportation
Accommodation & stays
Services / On site

Grand-Bassam travel inspiration

Find unique Stay Offers with our Partners

Pictures and images Grand-Bassam

Pêche à l'épervier sur la lagune. Elodie VERMEIL
Sur la lagune. Elodie VERMEIL
Parsemé de vieilles bâtisses abîmées par le temps et les embruns, le quartier France est un musée à ciel ouvert. Elodie VERMEIL
Une vue panoramique de Bassam depuis le sommet du phare. Elodie VERMEIL
Send a reply