Post · #ai

Visiting Malian monuments in 3D

Sep 27, 2026·4 min read·#ai #3d #mali

There are places in Mali I've wanted to see for as long as I can remember. The Great Mosque of Djenné is at the top of that list. I grew up in Bamako, but because of the security problems Mali has been going through for the last fifteen years, I never made the trip. And I know I'm not the only one.

So I started a small side project: rebuilding some of these places in 3D, so that people like me can walk around them from a phone or a laptop. It's called Monument223 (+223 is Mali's phone code).

My little benchmark

Every time a big new model comes out, I give it the same test: rebuild one of these monuments well enough that I'd want to show it to someone. For a long time, nothing I got back was good enough to share.

GPT-6 Astra is the first one that changed that. I put it to work for about eight hours on my Max x5 plan (thanks OpenAI for the usage resets), and when I came back, I had something I was actually proud of.

Djenné

The latest one is the Great Mosque of Djenné. It's part of the Old Towns of Djenné, which are on UNESCO's World Heritage list, and it's probably the most famous mud brick building in the world. Here's the real one next to mine.

The Great Mosque of Djenné in daylight, with a man and his bicycle and goats in front of it.
The real one. Photo: Ruud Zwart, CC BY-SA 3.0
The 3D rebuild of the Great Mosque of Djenné in golden light, seen from the corner of its enclosure.
Mine, in the golden light setting

You can look around freely, fly over it, walk into the courtyard, go up on the roofs, or press play and let the guided tour do the work. You can also switch between daylight and a warm, late afternoon light.

Animation: the camera slowly moves along the front of the 3D mosque.
Walking along the front of the mosque

It started on September 22

The first monument was the Monument de l'Indépendance in Bamako. I launched the site on September 22, Mali's Independence Day, because I couldn't think of a better date for it.

The Monument de l'Indépendance in Bamako under a blue sky, with a yellow taxi in the foreground.
The real one. Photo: Nadia Diallo, CC BY-SA 4.0
The 3D Monument de l'Indépendance on its roundabout, with cars, a green minibus and trees around it.
Mine, roundabout and traffic included

There's even a "22 septembre" lighting mode that puts the monument in the colors of the flag.

The 3D Monument de l'Indépendance at night, lit in green, yellow and red.
The "22 septembre" mode
Animation: the camera circles the 3D Monument de l'Indépendance while cars drive around the roundabout.
The automatic tour around the monument

People reacted pretty well, so I kept going.

Tour d'Afrique

Next came the Tour d'Afrique, on the Faladié roundabout in Bamako, a tribute to African unity. For this one, I leaned on real data as much as I could: photos, OpenStreetMap for the roads and the building footprints, Google Open Buildings for the building heights, and satellite imagery for the ground. The visit lists every source it uses. It's a reconstruction, not a scan, so I'd rather be upfront about where it's accurate and where it's a best guess.

The Tour d'Afrique in Bamako, with a taxi and people walking on the road in front of it.
The real one. Photo: Rgaudin, public domain
The 3D Tour d'Afrique with the visit's interface: points of view, road directions and a small map.
Mine, with the visit's interface

And yes, there's traffic. It's Bamako traffic, minus the honking.

Animation: cars driving around the Faladié roundabout, seen from above.
The Faladié roundabout from above

The first week

Here's what the first week looked like.

Traffic dashboard for the first week: 33.93k requests, 1.78k visits, 91.34% cache hit rate, 4 GB transferred, with a big spike on September 22.
Requests during the first week, September 21 to 27
  • 1.78k visits and 33.93k requests.
  • 4 GB sent, and about 91% of the requests were served straight from the cache.
  • Almost half of the requests came from Mali, then the United States, France and Sweden.
  • A bit more traffic from phones than from computers.

The spike on the 22nd was expected. Sweden was not, so hello Sweden. And since more people came from a phone than from a computer, the mobile version can't be an afterthought.

What's next

I'll keep adding places, and I'll keep giving the same monuments to every new model to see how they compare. These are reconstructions, so some details are simplified and some are a best guess. If you know one of these places well and something looks off, I want to hear it.

And if there's a place in Mali you'd love to visit this way, tell me. The chat on this site can send me a message.

One day, I'll go to Djenné for real.

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