🌆 Dakar

Senegal · Africa · 14.72°N, 17.47°W

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A fuller introduction to Dakar is briefly reloading — the key facts below always show.

Quick facts

CountrySenegal
Continent / regionAfrica
Coordinates (approx.)14.72°N, 17.47°W · view on map

Dakar is in Senegal, a country in Africa. For the living forecast here, open World Weather; Dakar’s population and history are described by the sourced introduction above (from Wikipedia).

Where Dakar sits on the Earth

At 14.72° north of the equator, Dakar is about 1,637 km from the equator itself and 8,371 km from its nearest pole — and that puts it inside the tropics, where the sun passes directly overhead twice a year and the yearly swing in day length stays small. Latitude is only the sky’s address, of course: altitude, oceans and winds write the actual weather, which is why two cities on the same parallel can need overcoats in one place and sun hats in the other. The numbers on this page come straight from the town’s own coordinates.

Two consequences of that latitude anyone can test. On the equinox the midday sun stands 75.3° above the horizon here (straight up at the equator, lower the further you go). And because the Earth is a sphere turning once a day, a point at this latitude is carried around its axis at roughly 1,619 km/h — fastest at the equator, nothing at the poles. As for daylight: Dakar sees its longest day lasts about 12.9 hours of daylight and its shortest about 11.1.

Nearest cities on our list: Conakry (705.5 km to the southeast), Freetown (833.4 km to the southeast), Bamako (1,049 km to the east-southeast), Ouagadougou (1,742 km to the east). Every profile here carries the same arithmetic, so the distances between any two of them can be checked by opening both pages.

The other side of the world: a straight line through the centre of the Earth from Dakar emerges at 14.72°S, 162.53°E — its antipode. The closest city on our list to that point is Honiara, about 651.2 km away; whether the antipode itself is ocean or land is a good quiz question before you look it up.

Coordinates are an approximate city centre. Introduction & image: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), cached 30 days; the page renders even if the feed is momentarily unreachable.

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