The Sindou Peaks are a ridge of banded sandstone towers in Léraba province, in the far southwest of Burkina Faso near the Ivorian border, weathered into needles and corridors that the Senufo people hid inside from slave raids and still honour with offerings, and they rise straight out of the fields, with villagers ploughing and harvesting up to the foot of the spires. The ridge is a few kilometres long and its towers stand in rows, the sandstone banded pink, grey and ochre and eroded into cones and blades, so that from the road they are a skyline and at ground level they become a place to be inside, a maze of passages and chambers between the rock; the Senufo did not stumble on them, since their tradition tells of a sacred python that led the people south to the towers, and between them lie the traces of the first village, house remains, altars and shelters used for initiation, where offerings are still left and the guides from the village explain what may be photographed. Trails lead up onto the rock itself to viewpoints on top of the spires, with the savanna, the fields and the village below.
The same plateau of sandstone that splinters into needles at Sindou swells into smooth round domes at Fabédougou, forty kilometres east near Banfora, and the region holds the country's other sights, the Karfiguéla waterfalls and the hippo lake of Tengréla, so that the peaks are done from Banfora by moto-taxi with a guide on the red laterite tracks that skirt the base of the rock. Sindou is also the springboard for Ténakourou, the highest point in Burkina Faso, which reaches all of 747 metres. Nothing here blooms or migrates on cue; the rains end in October, the tracks harden and the grass drops back, so from November the corridors are open and the banded rock reads sharp. The Sindou Peaks are a fortress the Senufo found in the rock, and the fields go up to its walls.