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The Senegal River Valley has been the scene of major developments since colonial times, revealing the political, economic and strategic stakes of the river. Using specific examples of oral poetry in the Fulani language, we want to show that they testify, through their form as much as their content, to a strong attachment to a territory, to practices and uses of the land bordering the river, to sociabilities and power relationships -in short, to modes of relationships to river landscapes and resource management- mostly not taken into account in the policies of territorial planning concerning this region. The watershed-scale design, conveyed by this poetry, has given way to a technical approach driven by valley developments since the 20th century. The observation is that this passage constitutes a rupture of an "ecological continuity" between wâlo and diêri, understood as the weaving that the hydrological network allows of a myriad of ponds between them and which, in itself, acts as a living entity.