From the 1816 Kombo treaty to the 1970 Tourism Development Area

Wikipedia's account of Alexander Grant states that on 23 April 1816, Grant, acting for Britain, agreed a lease of St Mary's Island with Tomani Bojang, described as King of Kombo, for an annual payment of 103 iron bars then worth about twenty-five pounds, founding the settlement later renamed Bathurst. Britain's later acquisition of the Ceded Mile on the north bank is described as widening the same trading foothold at the river mouth, within and alongside Kombo territory. ^{[wikipedia-alexander-grant-bathurst]}

Wikipedia's article on tourism in the Gambia states that this later industry grew up alongside continuing groundnut, or peanut, exports, the colonial-era economic mainstay that had dominated Kombo and the wider country since the nineteenth century. This archive does not yet have a directly read source for the nineteenth-century Kombo groundnut trade itself and flags that as an open research task rather than asserting a continuous economic narrative. ^{[wikipedia-tourism-gambia]}

The same article states that organised tourism began in 1965 when the Swedish operator Vingresor, working with Bertil Harding, brought roughly 300 Swedish visitors to Bathurst, and that visitor numbers grew to about 2,600 by 1970 to 1971 and over 8,000 by 1971 to 1972, with hotels increasing from two in 1965 to thirteen by the early 1970s. It adds that in 1970 the government designated an eight-hundred-metre-wide coastal Tourism Development Area running from Kololi to Kartong, which set the geography for later beach-resort growth at Kotu, Fajara, Bakau, Kololi and the Senegambia strip near Serekunda. ^{[wikipedia-tourism-gambia]}