Dakar offers travelers the chance to enter a world of exotic flavors. It is the best place for a curious palate eager to travel between new flavors and scents of spices, as Senegal’s cuisine has a reputation as the best in Africa. A cuisine influenced by France, Lebanon, Portugal and Vietnam but with its own character and complex flavors.

Dakar, being surrounded on three sides by the Atlantic Ocean, floods its restaurants with the best seafood and fish, brought by the fishermen’s colorful canoes of the area to be sold in the Soumbédioune market immediately. Shrimps, lobsters, sea urchins, grouper, tuna, monkfish, mackerel, swordfish and crabs are exquisite.

A good dish of meat, fish or senegalese seafood always comes with rice (Yassa), base of their cuisine along with wheat and millet.

The most popular Senegalese dish is indeed the mix of these two ingredients: rice and fish marinated to elaborate the traditional tieboudienne, their national dish.

Yassa au poulet is another of their popular dishes, a recipe based on chicken marinated with lemon and onion or blunt maffe, which used to be prepared with lamb and rice and accompanied by a delicious peanut sauce.

Quenching the color with fruit juices made in the are is a pleasure. The ones that you will easily find are those of roselle (Hibiscus), Bouye (from Bwee, baobab fruit) and ginger. They are very refreshing and provide many vitamins.

Street stalls and markets are great places for a quick meal. The vendors are placed around the market with their stalls selling beignets, fritters that will sweeten your day. The best market to find them is Sandanga, located on the corner of the Pompidou and Lamine Gueye Sandaga avenues.

Just4u
Avenue Cheikh Anta Diop
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Two leading national prides are brought together here: gastronomy and music. The best place to enjoy the city’s musical talents , extraordinary musicians like Youssou N'Dour, Didier Awadi or Baaba Maal started here. With a daily schedule of concerts, you'll enjoy a lively evening in this cozy outdoor restaurant.

Le Djembe
56 Rue Saint-Michel

Dakar has a large Lebanese community. Although the place is owned by one of those expatriate Lebanese, the restaurant’s menu is Senegalese. Ideal to taste the best typical recipes like the thieboudienne or chicken with rice served with refreshing juices as Bouye (from baobab) or bissop (hibiscus).

Cabane des Pêcheurs
Plage de Ngor
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One of the best places to try the local fish and seafood on the seafront in the lively beach of N'Gor. Its interior is decorated with lots of nautical motifs.

Le Toukouleur

122 rue Moussé Diop
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All the colorful African culture gets together in this restauran, with a courtyard decorated with painted clay statues. Perfect to try out a mixture of refined local cuisine and international flavors.

Why not take a trip to Dakar? Have a look at our flights here!

Urban beaches, idyllic little coves, rolling hills, mountainous landscape, lunar landscape, sunsets, forests, mountains, fairy-tale paths and friendly locals. The Canaries have it all!

Text by Aitor Lagunas | @aitorlagunas
Ilustration by Pep Boatella @pepboatella

Idealized goal for the European adolescence, Amsterdam is also the perfect destination for a weekend walking among cobbled streets and canals. Home and birthplace of the legendary Ajax and of Netherlands’s total football exhibited in Euro’88, this city also offers places that make it a treasure for the football culture.

SPORTING ELEVEN

1 Olympic Stadium | Designed by Jan Wils -founder of the movement De Stijl along with Piet Mondrian- hosted the 1928 Games.
2 Coffee Jonkhart | 1894: three students come together and they founded the Footh-Ball Club Ajax (misspelling included), predecessor of toda’s Ajax.
3 Museumplein | If you travel to Amsterdam just when Ajax wins an Eredivisie, you may celebrate it at the Rijksmuseum’s park.
4 Meer Stadium | Ajacied home demolished in 1996. The streets surrounding are named after football stadiums. Bernabeu, corner with Prater.
5 Cruyff | He was born at the Civil Hospital in 1947. He grew up in the Betondorp’s neighborhood, near to Meer, where his parents ran a fruit shop.
6 Amsterdamsche Hockey Club | it has more than 2,000 members and has won the last two leagues in Dutch’s other national sport.
7 Voldenpark | Here you will watch football games as well as play them. At this park, sided games are played during the weekend.
8 Oude West | Gullit, Rijkaard or Bergkamp grew In De Baarsjes’s neighborhood. Van Gaal, however, is from the other side of town …
9 FC Amsterdam | Ajax’s local hegemony had only opponent in the ’70s, when FC came to play European competition. Now is amateur.
10 Amsterdam Arena | Since 1996, Ajax finally has the stadium it deserves. Inaugurated the consumist version in the soccer fields.
11 Copa | A brand created by a former player in order to wear ingenious shirts about football. The shop is worth a visit.

TOURISTIC ELEVEN

A Rijksmuseum | Reopened in 2013, offers a wide collection of flamenco painters, led by Rembrandt and Johannes Vermeer.
B Heineken Museum | It all started when Gerard Adriaan Heineken met a disciple of Pasteur. Today is Netherlands’s beer.
C Flowers Market | Tulips, national symbol, are the focus of this charming market between channels. An ecological and cheap souvenir.
D A Jordaan Festival | In Amsterdam’s trendiest neighborhood, there’s room in September for street concerts and food stalls.
E Canal Parade | Just before, on the first Saturday in August, a water caravan runs through the city canals with pride
F Ane Frank´s House | After visiting it, one still not understand what threat might suppose that girl who dreamed of being a writer.
G MacBike | Maybe the best way to explore a city with few avenues and many alleyways. And certainly, the native way.
H Red Light District | Around the oldest church in the city have been crowding nightspots, in a strange urban combination.
I National Library | It is one of the architectural emblems of new Amsterdam. It has a cafe on the terrace.
J Coffeshop | Attention: Dutch liberals are wiping out the classic destination for all stoner teenagers. There is still some places.
K Dam Square | City center. Every few minutes spanish-spoken tours depart from it for very little money.

Text by Aitor Lagunas | @aitorlagunas
Ilustration by Pep Boatella @pepboatella

So you feel like visiting Amsterdam, do you? Book your flights here!

Apart from such irresistible cities as Venice and Verona, which tend to hog all the tourists’ gazes and flashes, Veneto also has other jewels to be seen and discovered and places which will quench your wanderlust. Not far from one of the leading lights of the region lies the Brenta Canal, linking Venice to Padua. It is well worth getting off the beaten track to discover it.

The river Brenta, which rises in the province of Trentino and flows into the Adriatic, was channelled between Venice and Padua in the 16th century to facilitate travel and the flow of goods between the two cities. Noble Venetian families then started building grand villas along the banks of the river. They served both as the agricultural headquarters of farming estates and as leisure resorts where their owners arrived in the summer months and where lavish parties were held. Over time, the canal became known as the “Riviera del Brenta”, where aristocrats flitted from party to party in luxury barges called burchiellos.All this splendour came to an end with the arrival of Napoleon, but those opulent villas, some of which have priceless gardens, have survived to the present and become a tourist draw in the area.

The best way of touring the Brenta Canal is obviously by barge. This will enable visitors to see first-hand the unusual system of locks, as well as the villas that are still standing, which number about eighty in all. You can take a barge either from Padua or the Venice ferry terminal and some of them include villa tours on the ride. Here, then, are the the standout villas, among those open to the public:

Villa Foscari

This beautiful villa, the work of Andrea Palladio, is nicknamed “La Malcontenta” because legend has it that Elisabetta Dolfin, the wife of Nicolò Foscari, was confined there allegedly for being an adulteress. Built from 1555 to 1560 on the Brenta riverside, it is noteworthy for the huge pedestal it is set on and its spectacular portico in the form of a classical pronaos, surmounted by a pediment, reminiscent of an ancient temple. The interior boasts some magnificent frescoes depicting mythological themes executed after 1566, the work of Giovanni Battista Zelotti.

Villa Pisani

Built in the 18th century and commissioned by the Pisani family, this spectacular villa with a certain Versaillesque air is an obligatory visit. Among the marvels to be seen in its interior is Tiepolo’s Glory of the Pisani family, which adorns the ceiling of the Dance Hall. Other highlights of this building include the enormous gardens, with ponds and a large maze which invites visitors to get lost in search of its Minerva statue, which crowns the belvedere. The stables, too, are worth visiting.

Villa Widmann Rezzonico Foscari

This villa was built in the early-18th century by the Scerimanns, a family of Venetian nobles of Persian extraction. The simple lines of its exterior strike a contrast with the richly ornate interior, decorated with French-inspired frescoes and Rococo stuccowork.

Book your Vueling to Venice to see the wonders of the Brenta Canal and its spectacular villas.

Text by Los Viajes de ISABELYLUIS