FORGET innocent piña coladas by the pool and cheeky glances at topless barmen – now sun-seeking, sex-loving Brit grans are boarding planes in search of far more risky adventures.
Wealthy older women are jetting off this summer for one reason only: to romp with men decades younger – and substantially poorer – than themselves. And this week the beaches are set to be more rampant than ever.
The country is a popular holiday destination for Brits – and not just for the cheap package deals[/caption]
Thousands of Western women now travel to the region’s resorts every year[/caption]
Senegambia strip, where many of the dubious relationships unfold[/caption]
Promiscuous pensioners are heading in their droves to The Gambia, the west African country where exotic food is far from the spiciest thing on the menu.
Despite a plea made by The Gambia Tourist Board asking elderly Brits to go elsewhere to look for young lovers, the problem has only got worse.
Sex tourism is said to be “rampant” in the nation dubbed ‘The Gran-bia’ – a real-life Tinder for geriatrics.
Promiscuous pensioners
The practice is so common there that gigolos known as ‘bumsters’ are rife on every beach and in every bar and restaurant on the country’s popular Senegambia Strip.
And authorities have become increasingly desperate to put a stop to it and clean up the country’s image.
The Sun last visited The Gambia three years ago at a time when the government was promising a crackdown on the grab-a-granny culture – proposing to bring in laws to make it easier to arrest local beach boys and older women engaged in suspect relationships.
Abubacarr Camara, director of the country’s office of tourism, said: “What we want is quality tourists. We want tourists that come to enjoy the country and the culture, but not tourists who come for sex.”
However, we found that – despite pleas for them to stay away – scores of lusty, middle-aged women were back on the hunt for muscular young men.
Since then, locals tell us the situation has reached new lows and that the popular Kololi beach resort is regularly swarming with women from Sweden, Russia, Germany, Holland and the UK.
One male beach worker claims randy holidaymakers initiate contact by asking for massages.
Hit new lows
The man, who called himself Nana, said: “The rich women, but also sometimes the men, come up to you and ask for a massage. That’s how it all begins.”
For a lot of these British ladies looking for a bit of fun, there’s only one thing on their minds – and it’s not a long term commitment.
Barbara, 65, from Dartford, Kent, who declined to give her surname, told us: “I don’t know what all the fuss is about. I’m not doing anything illegal. If you go to somewhere like Thailand you see loads of old men with young girls, but no one talks about that.
“The minute a woman gets together with a younger man, there’s an uproar and we’re called cougars and sex tourists. I came here for a bit of fun and I’m not harming anyone. If I want to take a good-looking bloke to my hotel room it’s no one’s business but my own.”
While prostitution is illegal in The Gambia, the fact that Western women rarely pay for sex – but tend to foot all their lover’s bills during the holiday then send them financial gifts when they return home – means arrests are rarely made.
And it’s not clear how many of the thousands of women who travel there every year are actually sex tourists.
Prostitution is illegal
Many would insist they are not, saying they only take on a toyboy after genuinely falling in love.
British mum-of-nine Heidi Hepworth, 51, converted to Islam so she could marry her Gambian fiancé Mamadou Salieu Jallow, 14 years her junior, back in 2018.
She said: “No-one imagined this would last but we love each other and are making plans to marry. I’ve never been happier.”
Mum-of-one Alainna Nichol, 43, from York, is not a sex tourist. But it did not take long for her to see why the country is dubbed ‘the Gran-bia’ when she visited with her husband on a TUI package holiday last December.
She said: “My husband did see a middle-aged woman from Leeds marrying a local man at one of the beach bars. He said it was a really nice wedding. They were both all in white and her daughters, who were in their late teens or early 20s, were there to see the ceremony. The woman was in her 50s and the man in his 30s so I guess that’s not a big age gap given the Granbia’s reputation!”
The women rarely pay for sex but instead pick up their partner’s bills during the holiday romances[/caption]
Marriages like this are not a rarity. Posts on social media show that huge numbers of British women have married Gambian men.
However, it’s not always a happy union.
One Reddit user claimed she used to issue marriage visas and said she couldn’t count “the number of times we would get calls from the wives asking us to rescind the visa as the husband had run off after reaching the UK.”
Other comments warned that Gambian men are notorious for ‘love bombing’, the practice of showering someone with excessive attention and affection to make them fall for you.
But it all paints a picture of a culture so poor, men would do anything to get out.
People are dying at sea in the search of a better life… Many of those left behind have little choice but to go out and look for Westerners that can support them.
Ali Cham
Ali Cham, 39, plays at music venues along the notorious Senegambia Strip, where gyrating OAPs sip £1 bottles of beer and the sound of reggae music clashes with the grind of walking frames scraping against the floor.
He says poverty here is so dire that many young men feel they have no choice but to sleep with older people.
Dad-of-five Ali, who performs under the name Killa Ace, said: “When you go to the strip or the tourist resorts, it’s happening in plain sight. For me, with my principles, it’s not something I would want to do, but there are people here that are desperate for a better life.”
Hotel boss Lamin Touray, 35, says even a short-lived romance with a Westerner can be life-changing for poor Gambians.
He told The Sun: “You have to remember these women are trying to get a man, because they can’t find one in their own country. They know that if they come to The Gambia they can use their money to have a young guy. I don’t see it as a bad thing because for these boys, it changes their life. It can help them buy a car or a compound (house) and open a business.
“Some of them want to travel to the UK or US and once they are married they want to help them, but that happens less now because the women prefer to live in The Gambia or send money here.
“The women do this because they know that if they take the boys home they will betray them. Once they get to Europe, they will find their way out, or they won’t want to work and the woman will be the one doing everything for the boy.”
Despite such desperation for a new, more prosperous life, it appears many Gambians are frustrated with the practice and long for a change.
In fact, social entrepreneur Olimatta Taal says locals have had enough of tourists dubbed ‘Dirty Sarahs’ and ‘Dirty Harrys’ coming to their country.
She said: “At the end of the day, if a family is poor – they are making 1,000 dalasi (£10.77) a month. All of a sudden this white European male or female comes with thousands of pounds, offers to take their child to Europe, gives them a visa, give them a better life, they turn a blind eye.”
Without the option of a rich Western woman, life can look incredibly bleak for many in The Gambia.
EU statistics show that 9,000 Gambians took a perilous 600 mile journey to the Canary Islands in Spain, a route known as ‘the backway’ to land illegally in Europe in 2023.
The world’s most notorious ‘sex markets’
- AURORA: Aurora Avenue strip in Seattle has become a magnet for prostitutes, pimps, gangs and ‘Johns’ since the pandemic. Experts say 300 people buy sex there every day, and there are now as many as 60 working girls working on the notorious thoroughfare – many of them underage. Drugged up prostitutes are regularly seen touting for business in their underwear – and authorities seem powerless to stop it.
- PAULI: The Pauli district in Germany’s port city of Hamburg houses a street once dubbed the ‘world’s most sinful mile.’ At night, bright neon signs light up sex houses including the eye-catching Pink Palace, which is open 24 hours a day and according to one escort website, “boasts 60 international girls across five floors”. In the 1980s the Pauli district was reportedly home to more than 1,000 prostitutes – however figures suggest it’s far, far fewer today.
- SOSUA: The sleazy beach resort of Sosua in the Dominican Republic is a sex tourists paradise where prostitutes fill the bars and clubs and drug dealers openly sell Viagra to elderly men. Sex is for sale at just £30 a time and desperate women travel from all over the Caribbean Island line the streets searching for their next trick. A Sun investigation previously found that taxi drivers would even offer to deliver teenage prostitutes to punters’ hotel rooms.
- JACKSON HEIGHTS: A stretch of Jackson Heights, New York, has become an open-air sex market where prostitutes proposition passersby at all hours — and frustrated residents say they’re helpless to do anything about it. Sex workers openly cruise the street, as older madams sit nearby and point out potential johns as they pass by. Officials blame soft-on-crime laws that severely limit what police can do to crack down on the scourge.
- HOLBECK: Holbeck in Leeds was the country’s only “managed” area for sex workers until the scheme was shut down in 2021. The programme allowed sex workers to solicit punters at certain times without fear of being arrested. But residents claimed it blighted their lives with condoms and needles littering the floor and hookers offering blow jobs for £5 a time in full view of school kids.
Musician Ali added: “There still isn’t much opportunity and the cost of living keeps going up, so just buying food for your family can put you in debt. It makes people frustrated about the system. Many of those left behind have little choice but to go out and look for Westerners that can support them.”
Remittances, or international money transfers, sent from abroad now account for 50 per cent of The Gambia’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Tourism makes up 15.5 per cent of GDP and more than half of The Gambia’s 2.5 million residents live in poverty, according to a 2021 report by the World Bank.
The average wage is just £181.25 a month and 41 per cent of young people are out of work, which means the £50 a day the average tourist will spend holidaying in The Gambia makes them seem rich.
The Gambia – a former British colony – took off as a tourist destination when Thomas Cook started selling budget package holidays including cheap flights in the 1990s. Package holiday deals now cost as little as £529, clearly a huge draw for tourists – not to mention lusty ladies of a certain age.
MY VIEW by Graeme Culliford
THE sight of smooth young skin pressed against wrinkly old flesh is all too common in The Gambia.
For many young men, sleeping with a grandmother is an unavoidable rite of passage, something you do stoically to put food on the table.
It’s little wonder that thousands are risking dying at sea rather than spending another second in a land where there is so little opportunity.
The Gambia is a beautiful country, but a cursed place to be born.
I have visited the West African nation twice in the last five years and the same type of visitor keeps coming back year-after-year.
There is nothing wrong with people of different ages falling in love, or having fun together.
But the transactional nature of these holiday romances makes the spectacle unsightly.
The women might kid themselves they really have found ‘the one’ while shaking their sagging behinds at a Kololi beach bar.
But in reality they are no different from the elderly chaps sitting silently with their teenage Thai girlfriends.
Gambia’s tourism industry will be in much better shape once it can attract more families and young people.
But as long as it remains a cesspit of sex tourists, it’s going to be hard to convince that type of traveller to return.
