'Barcelona or death' Mothers' sorrow as Senegal's young men risk all to reach Europe

The view from the plastic chair in which Fatou Samba sits, looking out to sea, takes in many of the elements of the sorry tale of Senegal's lost men.

- Tracy McVeigh

She can see the distant shapes of the big industrial foreign fishing ships and tankers, from Europe and China, strung across the horizon.

Closer to shore are dozens of empty pirogues, Senegalese wooden fishing boats, rocking idle on a sea mostly denuded of fish.

On the beach itself, just where the small waves break, bringing in their crust of plastic waste, is a heap of masonry rubble. "That was the mosque," Samba says.

The ends of her own house, a U-shape with the two arms facing out to the beach, have also crumbled, including her bedroom.

"On 19 August the sea took it, the bed and the walls," she says, nodding at the rubble.

"Soon the sea will take it all, this house my grandparents built."

The dramatic coastal erosion here in Bargny, where generations have built lives around fishing, has been exacerbated by the dredging of a deep-water port for international shipping further along the coast.

Samba says the homes of 17 neighbouring families have been washed away in the past six months, dragged out on tides that keep on rising.

But the saddest sight Samba saw from her plastic chair was in November, when her 22-year-old son, Thierieno, left for Spain.

"I sat here watching him go, swimming out to the boat" - she demonstrates a one-armed breast stroke - "one hand holding up his phone out of the water."

For Thierieno, getting a job was difficult.

He couldn't follow his father into the dying fishing industry, but it was the peer pressure that finally got to him, sending him overseas to join the mass migration of men - and increasingly women and children - who are leaving a Senegal where they cannot see a future.

"He didn't want to go; his father didn't want it; but his friends were sending him messages, videos, from Madrid to come.

It looked as though he had no courage if he stayed.

It shamed Thierieno," Samba says.