The Ubari lakes are one of those places that look like a mistake in the landscape: mirrors of salt water, some an intense red from their algae, ringed by palm trees and enclosed by dunes a hundred metres high, right in the heart of the Sahara. They are no ordinary oasis, but the last visible remains of a gigantic lake — the so-called Megafezzan, which at its largest covered an area comparable to the Czech Republic — that spread across this whole region some 200,000 years ago and dried up completely only between three and five thousand years ago.
Around twenty of those lakes survive today, fed exclusively by the fossil aquifer that runs beneath the Sahara, with no river to replenish them: that is why their salinity is so extreme, up to five times that of the sea in some cases, comparable only to the Dead Sea. The most visited, Gaberoun, still has on its shore the ruins of an old abandoned Tuareg fishing village, one of the most melancholy and at the same time most photographed images of the Libyan Sahara.
This page describes that natural heritage in the detail it deserves. But it has to be said as clearly as the story is told: Libya is at Level 4, «Do Not Travel», and the Fezzan, where the Ubari lakes lie, adds extreme isolation and an access situation that in practice depends entirely on specialised operators.
Some 200,000 years ago, during one of the humid periods the Sahara went through cyclically, a gigantic lake known as Megafezzan covered much of what is now southern Libya, reaching about 120,000 km² at its largest, an area comparable to the Czech Republic. When the Saharan climate dried out again, between 5,000 and 3,000 years ago, that lake evaporated almost completely, leaving as its only visible trace some twenty salt lakes trapped among the dunes of the Ubari Sand Sea, fed ever since only by the fossil aquifer that runs beneath the desert. For centuries, Tuareg communities settled beside some of these lakes, such as Gaberoun, living off fishing a species adapted to the very high salinity and growing date palms right around the water. The region was part of Garamantian territory and, later, of the Tuareg sphere of influence in the western Fezzan. The village of Gaberoun was abandoned in recent decades, although it kept receiving desert tourism until the outbreak of the Libyan civil war in 2011. Since then, access to the lakes has depended entirely on specialised operators, amid regional instability and a longer-term threat: Libya's Great Man-Made River project, which draws water from the same fossil aquifer that feeds the lakes to irrigate the coast, with an estimated risk of exhausting the resource within 50 to 100 years.
Read the full history ↓The third Libya, the Saharan one: cradle of the Garamantian kingdom, a Tuareg crossroads of trans-Saharan routes and home to the country's oldest rock art, in a Sahara that was green thousands of years ago.
Read the history of The Fezzan and the deep Sahara →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
To understand the Ubari lakes, you need to go back long before human history, to the climate cycles the Sahara went through over hundreds of thousands of years. During the so-called African humid periods, when the monsoon moved much further north than usual and regularly watered the heart of the desert, rivers and streams fed a gigantic basin in what is now the Fezzan region. This was Lake Megafezzan. At its largest, around 200,000 years ago, it covered roughly 120,000 km², an area comparable to a country like the Czech Republic.
The lake was neither a one-off nor permanent. It grew and shrank several times over the last few hundred thousand years, following the Sahara's wet and dry cycles. In the most recent episode, between about 5,000 and 3,000 years ago, the climate dried out for good and the great lake evaporated almost completely. It is no coincidence that this matches the end of the African Humid Period, the same climate shift behind the wider desertification of the Sahara, which is also recorded in the rock art of nearby Tadrart Acacus.
What we now call the Ubari lakes are, quite literally, the last visible remains of that gigantic lake. There are about twenty smaller basins, trapped among the dunes of the Idehan Ubari sand sea. They survive only thanks to the fossil aquifer that still flows beneath the desert, with no connection to any surface river.
The Ubari dune sea lay within the sphere of the Garamantian kingdom. Its capital, Garama (today's Germa), is not far away, in the same Wadi al-Ajal. The Garamantes built a sophisticated system of underground channels, the foggaras, which let them irrigate crops in the middle of the desert for more than a thousand years. The Ubari lakes were not directly part of that farming system, but they did serve as landmarks and water sources within the wider Garamantian territory.
Centuries later, the Tuareg confederations took control of western Fezzan after the Garamantes declined. Under their influence, some of these lakes, Gaberoun in particular, supported small Tuareg fishing settlements. The fishermen caught a species adapted to the water's extremely high salinity and added dates to their diet. The dates came from palm groves along the shores, fed by layers of fresh groundwater that sit closer to the surface than the lake's salt water.
Human communities lived side by side with an extreme water environment: salt water ringed by dunes in the middle of the desert. That made the Ubari lakes an unusual example of how people adapted to one of the harshest places on the planet. It lasted for generations, thanks to what each community learned over time about the particular resources of each lake.
Of all the Ubari lakes, Gaberoun has the best-documented human history. For generations it was home to a small Tuareg settlement that fished a local species adapted to the extreme salinity of the water and grew dates in the palm grove around the shore. By every available account, life in Gaberoun was hard and isolated. It depended on a delicate balance between the lake's salt water, the oasis's fresh groundwater and the trade routes linking it to the rest of Fezzan.
At some point in the last decades of the 20th century, the people of Gaberoun left the original village. It was part of a wider rural exodus that emptied many of the most remote settlements in the Libyan Sahara, as people moved for the jobs and services of Fezzan's larger towns, such as Sabha and Ubari. The mud-brick ruins of the old village stayed standing by the lake, though, and over time they became part of the site's appeal for visitors.
In the decades before 2011, a small tourist camp opened on the same spot, with very basic palm-frond huts and minimal facilities. It made the most of a unique combination: salt water you could float in, palm trees, and the ruins of the abandoned village as a backdrop. The camp was a must-stop on any expedition to Fezzan until the Libyan civil war broke out.
During the decades of Muammar Gaddafi's rule, and especially from the 1990s, the Ubari lakes became one of the highlights of Libya's budding Saharan tourism. Trips combined Fezzan's archaeological heritage, such as the Garamantian ruins of Germa and the rock art of Tadrart Acacus, with spectacular natural scenery like this dune sea dotted with lakes.
A typical expedition set off from Sabha or straight from the town of Ubari in 4x4 vehicles. The drivers were experts at handling loose sand, an essential skill because reaching several of the lakes means crossing dunes more than a hundred metres high. Trips included nights camping by the water, the chance to float effortlessly in the saltiest lakes and traditional Tuareg hospitality around the fire.
The circuit never drew mass tourism, but it did support a local economy of guides, drivers and small camps like the one at Gaberoun. It also made the Ubari lakes one of the best-known images of the Libyan Sahara for travellers around the world, as distinctive as any of North Africa's other great desert landscapes.
When the Libyan civil war broke out in 2011, organised tourism to the Ubari lakes stopped abruptly, as it did across the rest of Fezzan. Since then the region has suffered the same political and security fragmentation as the rest of southern Libya. Rival factions dispute control of the territory, and the tourist infrastructure has at best been frozen in time and at worst fallen apart after more than a decade without maintenance.
Beyond the conflict, the Ubari lakes face a longer-term threat of a different kind: Libya's Great Man-Made River project. It is one of the most ambitious water-engineering schemes in the world. Since the 1980s it has pumped water from the same fossil aquifers under the Sahara to irrigate farmland and supply Libya's Mediterranean coastal cities. This large-scale pumping is steadily lowering the aquifer that feeds the Ubari lakes, among other places. Estimates suggest a real risk that the resource will be largely exhausted within 50 to 100 years if extraction continues at the current rate.
Together, these two threats leave the future of one of the Libyan Sahara's most remarkable landscapes uncertain. On one side, political instability rules out any kind of organised tourism or environmental management. On the other, the aquifer that keeps the lakes alive is draining slowly but steadily. The last remains of a lake that existed for 200,000 years could disappear, and this time the cause would not be a natural climate cycle but direct human action.
