It looks like someone poured pink paint into the water.
But Senegal’s famous Lake Retba can turn pink completely naturally.
Also known as Lac Rose, the lake lies near Dakar on Senegal’s Atlantic coast.
Why is Senegal’s Pink Lake pink?
The unusual colour comes from microscopic organisms that thrive in the lake’s extremely salty water.
One of them is Dunaliella salina, a salt-loving algae that produces reddish-orange pigments under conditions such as intense sunlight and high salinity.
Those pigments can give the water its famous pink appearance.
And the colour is not always the same.
Depending on sunlight, rainfall and salt levels, the lake can appear bright pink, reddish or much less colourful.
You can even float in it
Lake Retba contains extremely high concentrations of salt.
In fact, its water can be salty enough to make people unusually buoyant, allowing swimmers to float more easily.
For generations, local workers have also collected salt from the lake.
The Pink Lake actually stopped being pink
Then something remarkable happened.
Severe flooding in 2022 brought large amounts of freshwater into the lake.
That diluted its salt levels and disrupted the conditions responsible for its famous colour. The lake largely lost its pink appearance, while salt harvesting and tourism suffered.
But the story didn’t end there.
Local residents worked to remove excess freshwater and restore the lake’s conditions.
By 2026, the pink colour had returned and salt harvesting resumed.
So one of Africa’s most unusual natural landmarks is pink once again.