Richard Toll

Richard Toll means Richard's farm, toll being the Pulaar word for a farm, after the French botanist Jean Michel Claude Richard, sent here in 1822, who ran an experimental plantation in the 1820s trying to establish European and tropical crops on the river. The Château de Baron Roger, built in the same decade for the colonial governor, still stands beside the water: a two-storey arcaded folly, long derelict, with the river running past it. The town today runs on sugar, with a large plantation and refinery on the irrigated land around.

History

Until 1817 two communities, Ndiangué and Xhouma, stood here; that year the senior French official Schmaltz set up an outpost called l'Escale, and in 1822 Governor Baron Jacques-François Roger sent the botanist Jean Michel Claude Richard to work there and renamed it Richard's Toll. The town grew greatly after 1945 with the Mission Agricole du Sénégal, and a rice scheme begun in 1949 covered 6,000 hectares (Wikipedia, Richard Toll).

The main sights

• The Chateau de Baron Roger - an 1820s arcaded folly on the riverbank, derelict but standing.
• The river frontage - the Senegal river with Mauritania on the far bank.
• The sugar estate - irrigated cane covering the plain around the town.
• The garden site - the ground where the 1820s experimental plantation was laid out.

When to go

November to March is the cool dry season; the river valley is severely hot from April. Mornings are best. The cane harvest runs in the dry months.

Things to know

The chateau is a ruin, unrestored and unsafe to enter, and there is no interpretation at it. The town is an industrial sugar centre with little else. The heat here is among the worst in the country outside the deep interior.

Nearby

Lake Guiers is south, and Saint-Louis is west along the river.

Key facts