Located on the Atlantic coast, the country has a subtropical climate with distinct dry and rainy seasons, with average high temperatures in March reaching 34C
The country plays host to 50 miles of coastline that boasts white-sand beaches(Image: Getty Images/imageBROKER RF)
A breathtaking destination boasting 34C temperatures in March and direct flights from Britain offers travellers 50 miles of spectacular coastline featuring white-sand beaches. Dubbed ‘The Smiling Coast of Africa’, the Republic of The Gambia – or simply The Gambia – is so called after The Gambia River, which forms the core of the country’s geography.
It’s also mainland Africa’s smallest country and is celebrated for its friendly inhabitants. Situated along the Atlantic shoreline, The Gambia enjoys a subtropical climate characterised by distinctive dry and wet seasons.
In the capital, Banjul, average peak temperatures during March climb to 34C, whilst the ocean reaches an agreeable 26C. British holidaymakers travelling to Gambia can select from 17 airlines, according to Booking.com..
TUI operates holiday packages to The Gambia featuring flights from London Gatwick and Manchester Airport to Banjul International Airport, the nation’s capital. The journey from Britain takes approximately six and a half hours.
Despite measuring just 31 miles at its widest point, The Gambia features 50 miles of shoreline blessed with white-sand beaches, with standout locations including the coastal areas of Kotu and Kololi.
Surrounded entirely by the West African state of Senegal, The Gambia’s official language is English and has experienced “long spells of stability” since gaining independence from nearly 150 years of British colonial governance in 1965, according to the BBC.
A haven for nature enthusiasts, The Gambia is home to hippos, chimpanzees, crocodiles, and more than 600 species of birds. The nation also features nine distinct tribes, with the Mandinka forming the largest.
YouTuber Waleed Maoed, who recently visited The Gambia, documented his experience with locals in a video about the nation: “Honestly, it has been a great day in Gambia, home of the Smiling Coast.
“People here are awesome. Very welcoming. I definitely recommend visiting this country. This country is pretty cool.” He noted that despite having travelled to “many places” across Africa, Gambians had proven “super kind”.
The Gambia is a predominantly flat, low-lying strip of land split by the Gambia River, and, in what will come as a relief to those of us who struggle with jet lag, it operates on the same timezone as the UK.
Notable attractions include the River Gambia National Park, Kotu Beach, Kachikally Crocodile Pool, Albert Market and the historical Kunta Kinteh Island (previously called James Island).
Regarding traditional food, white rice accompanied by fiery sauces proves popular, according to The Gambian Experience, with the peanut-based Domoda stew serving as the national dish.
Additional specialities include spiced meat snack afra, meat-and-rice dish benachin, okra stew, palm wine, a bread variety called tapalapa, non-alcoholic wonjo juice, and chicken yassa.
Back in March 2013, Didi Danso penned a piece in the Mirror documenting a journey to The Gambia: “Stepping off the plane, warm air blasted me in the face. Temperatures are usually around 30C – one of the main reasons for its popularity with winter and spring sun-seekers.
“In the airport and beyond, people greeted me with a smiling face. This was so infectious that by the end of each day, my cheeks ached from smiling back.
“My first stop was the beautiful Kombo Beach Hotel in Kotu resort, where a light and airy room with a private balcony offered views of the ocean and beaches.
“Waking up to the sound of the sea was a delightful way to start the day. It convinced me to take a walk on the beautiful Bakau Beach – something I’d recommend to all.”
Senior Iranian official Ali Larijani has said Tehran is ready to engage in ‘realistic’ nuclear talks with the United States. Speaking in Muscat during a visit to mediator nation Oman, he said issues must be resolved through dialogue and not the ‘language of force’.
The photograph is so intimate, so vulnerable, it’s painful to look at.
It depicts a woman in her early 20s lying on a hospital bed twisted to the side, her wrists and ankles restrained. The black-and-white image — nearly five feet wide — is so crisp that bits of the woman’s toenail polish glimmer and the hair on her thigh appears to spark. Most pronounced: the loneliness and resignation on her face.
“I was 20 or 21 then. I’d had a psychotic episode and was taken to a public hospital in Massachusetts,” says Palm Springs-based artist Lisa McCord of the self-portrait she later staged. “I’m very transparent and I wanted to share my experience afterward. It was the ‘70s. I’d tell people, in school, I’d been in a psychiatric hospital and no one wanted to hang out with me — it was a very lonely time.”
McCord’s work is part of an exhibition at the Los Angeles Center of Photography addressing the idea of loneliness, now considered an epidemic in America. The exhibition, “Reservoir: Photography, Loneliness and Well Being,” was curated by LACP‘s executive director, Rotem Rozental, and includes participation from more than 40 artists representing “a wide array of geographies, approaches, ages, nationalities and lived experiences,” she says.
Rozental had been thinking about loneliness in our society — how increasingly pervasive it is — since the start of the pandemic. In late 2024 she began having conversations about it with LACP board chair and artist Jennifer Pritchard. Art reflects the world that we live in and Rozental felt that, as a photography center, LACP had an obligation to amplify “some of the larger issues” our society is grappling with.
“There’s something about photography that really brings people together around their vulnerabilities,” Rozental says. “Even if it just means you’re seeing, through an image, that someone else is experiencing what you’re experiencing.”
In this case: loneliness — “something that is looming heavy on everybody,” Rozental adds.
Asiya Al. Sharabi’s “Inward” (2025) addresses the uncertainty, and sometimes loneliness, of being a woman and an immigrant.
“Most recent studies indicate that 50% of Americans are often lonely,” Nobel says, adding that a December 2025 study found that “loneliness is increasing, even after the pandemic. And it’s driving a change in behavior, the big one being that people are disengaging from each other and community activities, so that also isolates them.”
What’s more, chronic loneliness has tangible, dangerous effects on our health, he says.
“Loneliness increases the risk of heart attack and stroke and general early mortality by up to 30%. Dementia risk goes up by 40%, diabetes risk goes up 35% from being chronically lonely. That’s increased the urgency to address it as a public health crisis.”
It’s important to note, Nobel says, that there’s a difference between being alone and being lonely, with the former potentially good for your health.
“Being alone means you don’t have social connection. Loneliness is the subjective feeling that you don’t have the social connections you want,” Nobel says. “You can be lonely in a crowd, you can be lonely in a racist workplace, you can be lonely in a failed relationship or marriage. But being alone can actually be quite positive — solitude. You can be in touch with thoughts and feelings and can have emotional growth.”
Nobel consulted with many of the artists during the development of “Reservoir.” It was a natural pairing as his more than 20-year-old nonprofit, the Foundation for Art & Healing, explores how creative expression helps individuals and communities heal. The experience “definitely validated ‘how do creative people use their creative orientation to further explore and reveal what’s going on with loneliness,’” he says. “That’s the power of this exhibit.”
A detail shot from Diane Meyer’s “The Empty Space of Nothing #43” (2025)
(Diane Meyer)
To create the exhibition, Rozental selected six photographic mentors, all established artists, each of whom chose a theme around loneliness — “aging,” “immigration,” “technology and hyper-consumerism” or “the solo creative process,” for example. The mentors then invited artists to create new work responding to their themes. Over nine months last year, the groups of artists met monthly on Zoom — “six countries and seven time zones,” says Rozental — along with therapists, scholars and others to plumb the topic.
The resulting exhibition features mostly two-dimensional photography but also includes multimedia works and 3D installations.
L.A.-based artist Diane Meyer sourced about 100 old black-and-white photographs from private collections. Then she hand-painted each of them, blocking out most everything in the image except select figures with white paint. The individuals in the photos appear to float in a sea of clouds or snow, disconnected.
In one image, two young boys teeter on a seesaw, as if suspended in midair; in another, a middle-aged man lies on a blanket in the fetal position, white paint spilling over onto his blanket and body, as if he is sinking into a void. The creative process — which the work speaks to — is evident here, the artist’s hand noticeable. The paint is splotchy in places and the photographs are pinned delicately to a dark surface, their edges curling, giving the overall installation a textured materiality.
Meyer’s work is in stark contrast to Jacque Rupp’s installation on the opposite wall. Rupp’s slick multimedia work speaks to both technology and societal perceptions of aging women. After recently becoming a grandmother, the Bay Area-based artist asked AI to “imagine a grandmother in 2025.” The result is a black-and-white photo grid of several hundred female faces staring blankly into the camera, mouths closed and eyes vacant. Beside it is a TV monitor on which their faces morph into one another, without audio. The overall effect is polished and high-tech, touching on the perceived invisibility of women as they age.
“I felt that these two works needed to be in conversation,” Rozental says.
Julia Buteux’s “Have We Said Hello” (2025)
(Rotem Rozental)
Nearby, Julia Buteux’s three-dimensional installation of transparent fabric panels hang from the ceiling, shimmying in the air and inviting guests to walk around it. The Rhode Island-based artist downloaded images from social media and deleted the people from them. The backgrounds are colorful but all that’s left of the subject is a transparent imprint of their face and upper body. “So you’re getting the absence of the user,” Rozental says. It speaks to how isolating online social milieus can be.
Asiya Al. Sharabi — who is Yemeni American and lives between Egypt and Virginia — created large-scale, conceptual self-portraits that she manipulated in the printing process. One is a double exposure depicting the front and side of her face. It addresses issues of duality and the uncertainty of her standing in society as both a woman and an immigrant. In another, the artist sits in a rocking chair in a home beside a vase of dead flowers — but her body is transparent. “She almost disappears within the domestic space,” Rozental says.
McCord’s photograph is part of a larger interactive installation that includes a “visual diary” guests can flip through featuring photographs of her life over the decades paired with handwritten diary entries from 1977 to 2021. McCord narrates snippets from the diary, which visitors may listen to on headphones.
“Reservoir” aims, of course, to shine a light on the condition of loneliness. But it also hopes to serve as a public health intervention by hosting creative workshops — incorporating the photography in the exhibition — to address loneliness and spark connection.
“Creative expression changes our brains,” Nobel says. “It reduces levels of the stress hormone cortisol, it increases the levels of the feel-good hormones, so you’re less anxious about the world and in a better mood. It’s then easier to engage with others. It invites us to be less lonely and more connected, not just to other people, but ourselves.”
The exhibition, which closes March 14, is planned to travel internationally, including to the Museo Arte Al Límite in Chile, the Inside Out Centre for the Arts in South Africa and to the Karuizawa Foto Fest in Japan. The goal is to use the workshop element as a model that can be replicated in community arts organizations around the world.
Rozental says photography is the perfect conduit for that, calling the medium “a language, a space for connection and communication.”
“We hope that people will walk into this space and see themselves on the walls,” she says. “Maybe their burden will ease a little bit by knowing that they might feel lonely, but they’re not alone.”
Following Bad Bunny’s landmark album of the year win at the 68th Grammy Awards for “Debí Tirar Más Fotos,” Ricky Martin penned a letter of appreciation to commemorate the moment.
In an opinion piece for the Puerto Rican newspaper El Nuevo Día published Tuesday, the Boricua hitmaker said Bad Bunny’s accomplishment stirred deep feelings within him.
“Benito, brother, seeing you win three Grammy Awards, one of them for album of the year, with a production entirely in Spanish, touched me deeply,” Martin wrote. “Not only as an artist, but as a Puerto Rican who has walked stages around the world carrying his language, his accent and his history.”
In addition to becoming the first all-Spanish album of the year winner, the “Nuevayol” artist took home the Grammy Awards for música urbana album and global music performance for the track “EoO” on Sunday.
Martin further called Bad Bunny’s achievement a “human” and “cultural” win, lauding him for not bending to the will of anyone who tried to change his sound in any way.
“You won without changing the color of your voice. You won without erasing your roots. You won by staying true to Puerto Rico,” Martin wrote. “You stayed true to your language, your rhythms and your authentic narrative.”
Martin, who first broke out as a solo musical act in the mid-’90s, became an international superstar off the back of his Spanish-language hits including 1995’s “María,” 1998’s “Vuelve” and “Perdido Sin Ti.”
He reached a new strata of stardom after his track “La Copa de Vida” was used as the official anthem for the 1998 FIFA World Cup. That song charted in over 60 countries and was translated into English. He landed his biggest hit with “Livin’ La Vida Loca,” which was the lead single from his 1999 self-titled English album.
When accepting his album of the year award Sunday night, Bad Bunny addressed the crowd predominantly in Spanish and spoke of the strugglesof the immigrant experience.
“I want to dedicate this award to all the people who had to leave their homeland, their country, to follow their dreams,” he said in English.
“Puerto Rico, believe me when I say that we are so much bigger than 100 by 35 and there is nothing that exists that we can’t accomplish,” the “Dakiti” artist said in Spanish. “Thank God, thank you to the academy, thank you to all the people who have believed in me throughout my whole career. To all the people who worked on this album. Thank you, Mami, for giving birth to me in Puerto Rico. I love you.”
The 54-year-old singer also showed love to Bad Bunny for using his platform to show solidarity for vulnerable communities.
“What touched me most about seeing you on the Grammys stage was the audience’s silence when you spoke,” Martin wrote. “When you defended the immigrant community, when you called out a system that persecutes and separates, you spoke from a place I know very well where fear and hope coexist, where millions live between languages, borders and deferred dreams.”
Martin concluded his letter by thanking Bad Bunny for reminding him and showing other Puerto Ricans that there is power in being true and authentic to yourself.
“This achievement is for a generation to whom you taught that their identity is non-negotiable and that success is not at odds with authenticity,” Martin wrote.
“This was for Puerto Ricans, for all our Latino brothers and sisters who dream in Spanish, for those crossing seas and borders wearing their cultures like a flag. From the heart, from one Boricua to another, with respect and love, I thank you for reminding us that when one of ours succeeds, we all succeed.”
