Thousands of years ago, the Sahara was not the desert we know: it was a humid savanna dotted with lakes where herds grazed. When the climate began to dry out, around the fourth millennium BC, herding communities gradually retreated southwards and towards the last corners with water. On the rocky escarpment of Dhar Tichitt, in the south-centre of present-day Mauritania, these groups built hundreds of stone settlements between roughly 2000 and 300 BC: some five hundred are counted today, from small hamlets to villages covering several hectares.
Dhar Tichitt is one of the oldest and most remarkable archaeological complexes in West Africa. Its inhabitants domesticated pearl millet, raised cattle and built dry-stone walls, in what many researchers consider one of the earliest experiments in proto-urban life south of the Sahara. These agro-pastoral communities are often seen as the ancestors of the Soninke, the people who centuries later would found the Ghana Empire.
Ever since, the peopling of Mauritania has been that of a hinge land. From the north and east came nomadic Berber (Amazigh) peoples, above all the great Sanhaja confederation, camel herders and masters of the desert routes. To the south, along the Senegal River valley, lived — and still live — Black African peoples: Soninke, Halpulaar (Fulani and Toucouleur), Wolof and, later, Bambara, farmers and fishers of the river. From that encounter, not always peaceful, between the world of the camel and the world of the river, Mauritania's double identity was born.
Between the 8th and 13th centuries, much of the south of present-day Mauritania fell within the orbit of the Ghana Empire (Wagadu to the Soninke), the first of the great empires of the western Sahel. It had nothing to do with the African country that bears the name today: its heartland stretched across south-eastern Mauritania and western Mali, and its wealth came from controlling trans-Saharan trade, above all the exchange of gold from the south for salt from the desert.
Its capital is thought to have been Koumbi Saleh, in south-eastern Mauritania, today the country's largest archaeological site: a twin city, with one quarter for Muslim merchants and another for the Soninke king, which Arab chroniclers described as one of the richest of its time. Further west, on the edge of the desert, Aoudaghost (identified with the ruins of Tegdaoust) was the great terminal market for caravans coming down from the Maghreb: a prosperous oasis contested by the kings of Ghana and the Sanhaja Berbers.
In the 11th century the Andalusian geographer al-Bakri left a famous description of Ghana and its gold caravans. This trade, which carried African metal to the mints of the Mediterranean and Europe, was the economic engine of the whole region for centuries. And control of places like Aoudaghost would be precisely one of the sparks that ignited the movement that changed history: the Almoravids.
In the early decades of the 11th century, a movement that emerged in the Mauritanian desert would end up ruling two continents. It was born among the tribes of the Sanhaja confederation — the Lamtuna, the Gudala, the Massufa — nomadic peoples of the veil (the litham) who controlled the routes of the western Sahara. A Gudala chief, Yahya ibn Ibrahim, returned from the pilgrimage to Mecca determined to reform the Islam of his people and brought with him a strict preacher, Abdallah ibn Yasin, trained in southern Morocco.
From Ibn Yasin's uncompromising preaching arose the movement of the al-murabitun, "the people of the ribat", the Almoravids: a political and religious brotherhood that united the Sanhaja tribes under the banner of a purified Maliki Islam and of jihad. Its first great base was Azougui, a stone fort beside a palm grove near present-day Atar, in the Adrar, considered the first Almoravid capital. From there, under the military command of Yahya ibn Umar and later Abu Bakr ibn Umar, the Almoravids took Aoudaghost in 1054 and launched their conquests.
The momentum was astonishing. To the north, led by Yusuf ibn Tashfin, they conquered Morocco and western Algeria and founded Marrakech as their capital around 1070. Called in by the taifa kingdoms to halt the Christian advance, they crossed into the Iberian Peninsula and defeated Alfonso VI at the Battle of Zalaca (Sagrajas) in 1086, uniting al-Andalus under their rule. At its height, the Almoravid empire stretched from the Senegal River to the Ebro. It was they who definitively consolidated the Islamisation of the Maghreb and the western Sahara: a faith born among Mauritanian nomads that ended up shaping the Islamic world of the far west.
After the Almoravid era, between the 12th and 16th centuries, the Mauritanian desert filled with towns that lived off the great trans-Saharan trade. These were the ksour: walled settlements of stone or mud, each with its square-minareted mosque, set in oases and fertile valleys as compulsory stops for the caravans linking North Africa with the Sahel. Four of them — Ouadane, Chinguetti, Tichitt and Oualata — were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1996 as the "Ancient Ksour" of Mauritania.
Ouadane, founded around the 12th century on the edge of the Adrar plateau, and Tichitt prospered on the traffic in salt, gold and dates. Oualata, at the eastern end, shone above all in the 14th century under the Mali Empire: the great traveller Ibn Battuta walked its streets in 1352, and its houses became famous for the delicate red reliefs that decorate their walls. Chinguetti, refounded in the 13th century, became so important as a gathering point for West African pilgrims on their way to Mecca that it gave its name — Shinqit — to the whole country: for centuries, Mauritania was known in the Arab world as Bilad Shinqit, "the land of Chinguetti".
These towns were not just markets: they were universities of the desert. Chinguetti, considered the "seventh holy city of Islam", was nicknamed the "Sorbonne of the Sahara" for its schools of Quran, law, science and grammar. Its houses still keep family libraries with thousands of medieval manuscripts on theology, astronomy, medicine and mathematics, jealously guarded from generation to generation. They are proof that the Sahara, far from being a void, was for centuries a network of learning connecting Timbuktu with Fez and Cairo.
From the 13th and 14th centuries onwards, Bedouin Arab tribes of the Banu Maqil confederation — who claimed Yemeni origins — gradually pushed into the western Sahara from the north. Their arrival changed the balance of the desert for ever. Tension with the Sanhaja Berbers, the traditional masters of the land, erupted in the long Char Bouba (or Sharr Bubba) war, fought roughly between 1644 and 1674.
The war ended in victory for the Maqil Arabs, and from it emerged the social order that still defines Moorish (Bidan) society. At the top stood two groups of "White Moors": the Hassan, warriors and emirs who held political and military power, and the Zawaya (or marabouts), tribes devoted to religion, learning and trade, who agreed to give up arms in exchange for the prestige of knowledge. That Arab victory also gave its name to the language spoken today by almost all Moors: Hassaniya, an Arabic dialect with a strong Berber substrate.
Below them, the rest of the pyramid took shape: tributary Znaga tribes, artisans, griots and, at the base, slaves and their descendants. Here lies the sensitive distinction between the Bidan — lighter-skinned Moors of Arab-Berber descent — and the Haratin, the "Black Moors", descendants of enslaved Black African populations who adopted the Arabic language and culture of their masters. Alongside this Moorish desert society, in the south of the country, lives the non-Arabised Afro-Mauritanian population of the Senegal valley: Halpulaar, Soninke and Wolof. This structure of caste and race, forged centuries ago, is key to understanding many of the tensions in contemporary Mauritania.
Mauritania was one of the last pieces of the French colonial puzzle in West Africa, and one of the hardest to fit. In the early 20th century, the Corsican-born administrator Xavier Coppolani devised a strategy of "peaceful penetration": instead of conquering the warlike Moorish emirates (Trarza, Brakna, Tagant, Adrar) by force, he sought the support of the religious Zawaya tribes, weary of raids by the Hassan warriors. Coppolani advanced through the south in this way, but resistance was fierce and he was assassinated in Tidjikja in 1905. The conquest of the Adrar was only completed around 1909, and some desert areas were not brought under control until the 1930s.
France organised the territory as part of French West Africa, but in an unusual way: Mauritania was administered from Saint-Louis, in neighbouring Senegal, and did not even have a capital of its own within its borders. It was a marginal territory, sparsely populated and barely transformed by colonial rule, where the old tribal society remained largely intact.
Decolonisation came with the African wave of the mid-century. Under the leadership of Moktar Ould Daddah, Mauritania gained autonomy and, on 28 November 1960, full independence as the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. One of the first challenges was almost surreal: the country had no capital, so it was decided to build one from scratch. On a stretch of dunes by the coast, starting from a small ksar, Nouakchott was built, going from village to national capital. Ould Daddah governed for the next two decades, brought the country into the Arab world — Mauritania joined the Arab League in 1973 — and adopted its own currency, the ouguiya.
The first great trauma of independent Mauritania came from the north. When Spain withdrew from Western Sahara, the Madrid Accords of November 1975 divided the territory between Morocco, which took the north, and Mauritania, which occupied the south (Tiris al-Gharbiyya). But the Polisario Front, which demanded Sahrawi independence with Algerian backing, launched a guerrilla war that bled the weak Mauritanian army dry and wrecked the economy. Exhausted, the country suffered a military coup in 1978 that overthrew Ould Daddah, and in 1979 it made peace with the Polisario, withdrew from the conflict and gave up its share of the territory, which Morocco promptly occupied.
That 1978 coup opened decades of military instability. Military governments followed one another — Ould Haidalla, and from 1984 the long regime of Maaouya Ould Sid'Ahmed Taya, himself overthrown in 2005 — in a chain of coups that the press came to describe as almost a ritual. Only in 2019 did Mauritania see its first transfer of power between elected presidents, with the arrival of Mohamed Ould Ghazouani. Added to this turbulent history is another wound: the "events of 1989-1991", a wave of ethnic violence against the Black African population of the south that led to tens of thousands being expelled to Senegal and to the execution of Black soldiers, an episode that remains painful and unresolved.
And then there is the most sensitive issue of all: slavery. Moorish caste society maintained descent-based slavery for centuries, above all over the Haratin population. It was formally abolished several times — by the colonial administration, after independence and, most notably, by decree in 1981, which made Mauritania the last country in the world to officially abolish it — but for a long time those bans stayed on paper. Only in 2007 was slavery made a criminal offence, and a 2015 law toughened it and declared it a crime against humanity. Even so, human rights organisations report that descent-based slavery persists for tens of thousands of people and that enforcement of the laws remains weak. Abolitionist activists such as Biram Dah Abeid have been jailed for speaking out. It is a reality that must be named rigorously and without embellishment: part of a past that has not yet finished being the past.
21st-century Mauritania is a country of contrasts trying to reinvent itself. Its economy rests on what lies underground: it is Africa's second-largest producer of iron ore, which the state company SNIM mines in the north and ships out on the famous iron ore train; it produces gold on a large scale at the Tasiast mine; and since December 2024 it has been exporting liquefied natural gas from the huge offshore Greater Tortue Ahmeyim field, shared with Senegal, which promises to transform its finances. Fishing in its extraordinarily rich Atlantic waters and nomadic livestock herding complete the picture.
Politically, under the presidency of Mohamed Ould Ghazouani — re-elected in 2024 — Mauritania has earned a reputation as an island of relative stability in a Sahel consumed by coups and jihadism. It has not suffered a serious terrorist attack on its soil since 2011, a remarkable achievement in a region where Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso are sinking into violence; that is why it is sometimes described as the "last state standing" in the western Sahel. The country combines security cooperation with a policy of religious dialogue to contain extremism.
The challenges, however, are enormous. Poverty is high, climate-change droughts are hitting pastoralism hard, and the wounds inherited from history remain open: the after-effects of slavery and the caste system, tensions between the Arab-Berber and Afro-Mauritanian communities, and the unpaid debt to those expelled in 1989. Mauritania thus moves forward balancing between two worlds — Arab and Black African, desert and river, caravan tradition and the gas economy — trying to turn its position as a hinge, which for centuries was its destiny, into an opportunity.
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The peninsula where Nouadhibou stands today, Cape Blanc (Ras Nouadhibou), was one of the first points in Africa reached by European navigators. In 1443-1444, at the height of the Portuguese expansion driven by Prince Henry the Navigator, Portuguese ships reached this coast, and around 1445 the Portuguese built a fort on the nearby island of Arguin, the first permanent European trading post south of the Sahara.
From Arguin, the Portuguese traded gold, gum arabic and, very soon, human beings: the trading post became one of the first centres of the Atlantic slave trade, a dark chapter that has to be named clearly. The island was later fought over by the Dutch, the English and the French throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, in a tug of war between European powers for control of the Saharan coast.
That long maritime history explains why this seemingly remote northwestern corner of Mauritania carries so much weight. For centuries Cape Blanc was the Atlantic gateway to the desert: a place of encounter and of violence between Europe and Africa, long before the country called Mauritania existed.
The modern city was born as Port-Étienne, a French colonial outpost founded in the late 19th century at the tip of the peninsula. For decades it was little more than a fishing and military base at the edge of the empire. Everything changed in the mid-20th century with the discovery of huge iron ore deposits in the interior of the country, near Zouérat.
From 1963, the company MIFERMA — later nationalised as SNIM — laid a railway hundreds of kilometres long across the desert to carry the iron to the sea, and built an ore terminal in Nouadhibou. The old Port-Étienne, renamed Nouadhibou, thus became Mauritania's economic capital: the iron that accounts for a large share of the country's exports leaves through its port.
Iron and fishing made Nouadhibou a magnet for workers and a cosmopolitan city by Mauritanian standards. It is also a sensitive border crossroads, right next to Western Sahara, and a transit point on migration routes towards the Canary Islands. A city of ore, ships and borders, it sums up the Mauritania that looks out to the Atlantic and the global economy.
For decades, Nouadhibou Bay was famous for an unsettling and fascinating sight: hundreds of rusting ships abandoned in its shallow waters, in what came to be considered the largest ship graveyard in the world. Old fishing boats, disused cargo ships and vessels from all over the planet ended their days here, driven by lax controls, corruption and the low cost of getting rid of them in these waters.
Over time, more than three hundred hulls piled up in the bay, polluting the sea and getting in the way of fishing. In recent years, international clean-up programmes have removed many of these wrecks, but the ship graveyard is still part of Nouadhibou's legend and a surreal postcard from the Saharan Atlantic.
That landscape of stranded steel echoes, not by chance, the city's calling: the iron that comes down from the desert and the ships that die in its bay tell the same story of an extractive economy and porous borders at the Mauritanian end of the world.
South of the peninsula lies Banc d'Arguin National Park, one of Africa's great natural treasures and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1989. It is a vast area of shoals, sand islands and seagrass meadows where the desert merges with the ocean in shallow, extremely rich waters. Its importance for birds is global: every winter it gathers more than two million migratory birds arriving from northern Europe, Greenland and Siberia to spend the cold season, in one of the largest concentrations of waterbirds in the world.
That richness is, once again, the result of the Atlantic upwelling that fertilises the waters. Beneath the surface, seagrass meadows serve as nurseries for countless fish; above them hover waders, flamingos, pelicans and spoonbills by the million. It is an ecosystem as fragile as it is spectacular, protected from industrial fishing.
A unique people lives inside the park: the Imraguen, fishing communities with an age-old tradition who practise an artisanal fishing method famous for its cooperation with wild dolphins, which drive shoals of mullet towards their nets. The Imraguen are a living example of coexistence between people and nature in one of the most remote and beautiful corners of Mauritania.
Few capitals in the world have such a recent and deliberate origin as Nouakchott. When Mauritania became independent in 1960, the country had no capital of its own: it had been administered from Saint-Louis, in Senegal. One had to be invented. An almost empty spot by the Atlantic coast was chosen, where there was little more than a small ksar and a fort, and from the late 1950s an entire city was laid out and built on the sand.
The original plan envisaged a modest capital for a few tens of thousands of people. Reality overwhelmed it completely: the great Sahel droughts of the 1970s and 1980s drove thousands of ruined nomads to leave the desert and seek refuge in the city. Nouakchott grew explosively and chaotically, surrounding itself with informal settlements (the kebbe), until it became a metropolis of around a million people, by far the largest in the country.
Today Nouakchott is the political and economic heart of Mauritania, a vibrant crossroads where the turban and the boubou, Hassaniya Arabic and the languages of the river live side by side. It is a city of sand in the literal sense: the desert is always at the gates, the wind blows dunes onto the avenues, and the great urban challenge is holding back the Sahara and the ocean, which threatens it with rising seas.
If anything defines life in the capital by the sea, it is its Port de Pêche, the artisanal fishing port and one of the liveliest sights in Mauritania. Every afternoon, hundreds of hand-painted wooden pirogues — largely a legacy of fishermen who came from neighbouring Senegal — return to the beach loaded with fish, amid a bustle of nets, shouted auctions, wheelbarrows and seagulls.
The reason for such abundance is geography. Off the Mauritanian coast, the upwelling of cold, deep, nutrient-rich waters makes this stretch of the Atlantic one of the richest fishing grounds on the planet. Fishing is a pillar of the country's economy and diet, and also a source of tension over the agreements with foreign fleets that fish its waters.
Nouakchott's artisanal port sums up the country's mix: here desert Moors turned traders cross paths with Haratin and Afro-Mauritanians who do the hard work on the beach, and with Wolof and Lebou fishermen of Atlantic tradition. The colour of the pirogues and the smell of fish drying in the sun are the coastal face of a country we usually imagine as nothing but desert.
At the far southern end of the coast, where the Senegal River flows into the Atlantic and marks the border with Senegal, lies Diawling National Park. It is the other face of Mauritania: not the desert, but the wetlands, a world of water, marshes and birds that forms the Mauritanian bank of the great Senegal delta, twin of the famous Djoudj park on the Senegalese side.
Created in 1991 and recognised as a wetland of international importance under the Ramsar Convention, Diawling protects an ecosystem that had been badly damaged by the construction of the Diama Dam on the river. The park is part of an ambitious restoration project: artificially recreating the seasonal floods to bring the marshes, mangroves and pastures back to life.
The result is a sanctuary for hundreds of thousands of waterbirds and migratory birds — pelicans, flamingos, cormorants, herons — and a vital resource for local communities, who depend on fishing, herding and gathering. Diawling is a reminder that Mauritania does not end in the sand: on its southern border, the Senegal River waters a green strip where another economy and another culture thrive, that of the Africa of the rivers.
The Adrar is a plateau of rock and sand in north-central Mauritania and, without exaggeration, the historical and spiritual heart of the country. Here, beside a palm grove near present-day Atar, stood Azougui, a stone fort that was the first capital of the Almoravid movement in the 11th century. From this oasis, the veiled Sanhaja tribes, led by the preacher Abdallah ibn Yasin, launched the jihad that would take them on to conquer Morocco and al-Andalus.
The ruins of Azougui, among date gardens, keep the memory of those origins and the tomb attributed to Imam al-Hadrami, a scholar linked to the first Almoravids. That an empire which came to rule as far as the Ebro and founded Marrakesh was born in this remote corner of the Mauritanian desert is one of the great stories of African history.
Azougui is, together with Koumbi Saleh and Aoudaghost, one of the sites Mauritania keeps on the World Heritage tentative list. Visiting the Adrar is, to a large extent, a pilgrimage to the origins: to the place where a nomadic faith became an empire.
Atar is the capital of the Adrar region and the logistics base from which the whole area is explored. An old oasis town at the crossroads of caravan routes, it keeps an old quarter of narrow lanes and a historic mosque, and today it works as the great service centre of the Mauritanian desert: this is where 4x4s are arranged, guides are hired and expeditions stock up before heading to the ancient cities, the oases and the dunes.
During the French colonial period, the conquest of the Adrar — completed around 1909, years after Coppolani's death — was one of the hardest campaigns against the resistance of the Moorish emirates. Atar remained the military and administrative stronghold of the northern interior.
In recent decades, Atar even received direct charter flights from Europe bringing tourists drawn by the desert, until insecurity in the Sahel cut off that flow. Today, with Mauritania's stability restored, the town is once again the gateway for those who want to discover the country's Saharan heart.
The Adrar is home to two of the four caravan towns that UNESCO declared World Heritage Sites in 1996. Chinguetti, refounded in the 13th century, was so important as a gathering place for West African pilgrims on their way to Mecca that it gave its name to the whole country: for centuries, Mauritania was known in the Arab world as Bilad Shinqit. Considered the "seventh holy city of Islam" and nicknamed the "Sorbonne of the Sahara", it was a great centre of Koranic, legal and scientific learning.
Today Chinguetti is a cluster of stone half-buried in the dunes, with its old mosque and stone minaret and, above all, its famous family libraries: collections of thousands of medieval manuscripts on theology, law, astronomy and medicine, guarded for generations by the town's families and threatened by sand, climate and the passing of time.
A few hours away, perched on the edge of the plateau, Ouadane was founded around the 12th century and prospered on the trade in salt, gold and dates. Its ruined stone houses, stepped up the hillside, and its manuscript libraries make it Chinguetti's sister. Both towns are living proof that the Sahara was a great highway of knowledge, not a void.
The Adrar is not just history: it also has some of the most astonishing landscapes on the planet. Terjit, a few kilometres from Atar, is considered the most beautiful oasis in Mauritania: a spring of fresh water and a palm grove tucked into a rocky canyon, where caravans stopped for centuries to rest and drink. It is a corner of shade and water amid the dry vastness, a refuge from the Saharan heat.
Further north, near Ouadane, lies one of the most famous geological wonders on Earth: the Guelb er Richat, known as the Eye of the Sahara. It is a circular structure of concentric rock layers some forty kilometres across, so large and regular that it is clearly visible from space, where astronauts use it as a landmark.
For a time the Eye was thought to be a meteorite crater, but science now explains it as a geological dome eroded over millions of years, exposing rings of rock of different ages and hardness. Its colossal size and symmetry fire the imagination — some people link it, with no scientific basis whatsoever, to the legendary Atlantis — and make it one of the great draws of the Mauritanian desert.
In eastern Mauritania, at the foot of the Tagant escarpment and on the edge of the great erg (sea of dunes) of El Djouf, lies Tichitt, one of the four caravan towns declared World Heritage Sites in 1996. Founded around the 12th century, it was a key stop on the routes linking North Africa with the Sahel, living off the salt trade and the caravans.
Tichitt is famous for its stone architecture: its houses are built from carefully stacked slabs and decorated with geometric patterns, a building style that sets it apart. Today the town is half-abandoned and largely swallowed by sand, an almost ghost village where only a few families remain, along with the manuscript libraries that still survive.
This region also has enormous historical depth: not far away, the Dhar Tichitt escarpment holds hundreds of stone settlements built thousands of years ago by Neolithic herders, who created one of the first proto-urban cultures south of the Sahara. Tichitt thus brings together, in a single landscape, the most distant prehistory and the medieval caravans.
Further east still, almost on the border with Mali, stands Oualata, the easternmost and most isolated of Mauritania's caravan cities. Set on the edge where the desert meets the Sahel savannah, it reached its height in the 13th and 14th centuries, when it became a leading caravan port of the Mali Empire, the end point of the routes that brought gold up from the south.
In 1352 the famous Maghrebi traveller Ibn Battuta walked its streets. He reached Oualata after crossing the Sahara from the north and left an account of life at this crossroads. The city was also an important centre of Islamic learning, with its Quranic schools and manuscripts, and a meeting point between the Berber-Arab world and sub-Saharan Africa.
Above all, Oualata is famous for the beauty of its houses: mud walls decorated with delicate bas-reliefs and red and white motifs, a unique ornamental art traditionally made by the women of the city. Isolated and fragile, looked after by its few inhabitants, Oualata is a gem of eastern Mauritania, as beautiful as it is hard to reach.
Eastern Mauritania, made up of the Tagant region and the two Hodh regions (Hodh Ech Chargui and Hodh El Gharbi), is a frontier land. Here in the south-east lay the heart of the ancient Ghana Empire, with its capital at Koumbi Saleh, today the country's largest archaeological site. And here, right up against the border, much of Mauritania's security is at stake.
The Hodh regions border Mali, one of the epicentres of jihadist violence in the Sahel. That is why this eastern area is sensitive, even though Mauritania remains remarkably stable and has not suffered a serious attack on its soil since 2011. It should only be visited with local operators and with caution, and the state keeps a strong security presence there to stop neighbouring conflicts from spilling over.
The east is also a place of refuge: Hodh Ech Chargui is home to one of the largest refugee camps in the region, sheltering tens of thousands of Malians who fled the war. In just a few kilometres, this remote corner of the Sahara brings together the glory of medieval empires, the fragile beauty of the caravan cities and the most pressing challenges of today's Sahel.
In the far north of Mauritania, in the Tiris Zemmour region, the mountains hold one of the country's greatest treasures: huge deposits of high-grade iron ore, concentrated around the Kédia d'Idjil massifs, next to the town of Zouérat. In a country of poor soils and an extreme climate, that iron became the backbone of the national economy.
Mining began in the 1960s with the French company MIFERMA. In 1974, Ould Daddah's government nationalised it and created SNIM (Société Nationale Industrielle et Minière), a state company that has since been the country's main economic engine and its largest industrial employer. Thanks to it, Mauritania ranks among Africa's biggest iron producers.
Zouérat was born and grew up around these mines: an industrial town planted in the middle of the desert, tough and functional, where life revolves around extracting the ore. It is the hub of the mining north, the starting point of one of the most extraordinary journeys on the planet.
To carry the iron from Zouérat to the port of Nouadhibou, SNIM laid a railway of some 700 kilometres across the desert starting in 1963, which even had to pass through a tunnel to avoid disputed territory in Western Sahara. Along this line runs the legendary "iron ore train", one of the longest and heaviest trains in existence: convoys that can exceed 2.5 kilometres in length, with more than two hundred wagons loaded with ore and several locomotives.
The train crosses one of the harshest landscapes on the planet, through dunes, stony plateaus and scorching heat, on a journey of about twenty hours. It is a vital artery: it carries the iron that makes up a huge share of Mauritania's exports, on which much of the country's foreign currency depends.
But the iron ore train is also a travellers' legend. On the open wagons, perched on top of the ore, locals, traders and, more and more, adventurous travellers from all over the world ride for free, in search of one of the most extreme train experiences there is: hours out in the open, covered in the black dust of the iron, crossing the Sahara under the stars. Few images capture Mauritania's mix of hardship and grandeur better.
The mining north is not just about the economy: it is geopolitics. The railway runs parallel to the border with Western Sahara, and its route had to work around the tensions of that conflict; during the years of war with the Polisario, the line and the mines were targeted in attacks that threatened the country's main source of income.
The whole Tiris Zemmour region is a borderland: it borders Western Sahara, Algeria and Mali, in a sensitive area of the Sahel where Mauritania maintains a strong security presence. The fact that the country's economic heart beats in this remote, contested corner says a lot about the balances on which the Mauritanian state rests.
Today, alongside iron, the north and the rest of the country are betting on new resources: gold from the Tasiast mine and copper projects, as well as major green hydrogen plans that would harness the desert's sun and wind. The mining north, born with iron, wants to remain the engine of the Mauritania of the future.
Hardly anything that happened to Mauritania happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
