Banc d'Arguin National Park is one of Africa's great natural wonders and one of Mauritania's best-kept secrets: an immense strip of Atlantic coast where the Sahara Desert dissolves into a maze of sandbanks, sand islands and shallow waters that, every winter, become the world's largest feeding ground for migratory birds. Here, over two million birds —waders, flamingos, pelicans, terns— stop over or spend the winter, in a natural spectacle on a planetary scale.
Listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1989, the Banc d'Arguin protects a unique ecosystem where the great desert meets an ocean rich in fish, sparking an explosion of life. Its shallow waters, seagrass meadows and tidal mudflats feed millions of birds and extraordinary marine life: dolphins, turtles, rays and fish in abundance. It's a remote, wild place of austere beauty, very different from any African savannah park.
The Banc d'Arguin is also a human park: its coast is home to the Imraguen, a people of traditional fishermen famous worldwide for their ancestral way of catching mullet with the help of wild dolphins, which drive the shoals towards their nets. This guide tells you what to see, how to get the permit, when to go for the great bird migration, and how to organise an expedition to this coastal sanctuary, one of the most exceptional and least visited nature destinations in the world.
The Banc d'Arguin coast has a long history: the nearby island of Arguin was, in the 15th century, one of the first Portuguese trading posts in sub-Saharan Africa, a stop on the gold route and, sadly, on the slave trade, later fought over by the Dutch, English and French. But its great value is natural: the combination of cold-water upwelling and immense sandbanks creates one of the most productive marine ecosystems on the planet, the basis for the largest concentrations of waterbirds in the world. Inhabited since time immemorial by the Imraguen fishermen, the area was protected as a national park in 1976 and listed as a World Heritage Site in 1989. That natural and human history is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The country's economic capital, a city of iron and fishing on an Atlantic peninsula, next to one of the world's largest sanctuaries for migratory birds and home to the Imraguen fishermen.
Read the history of Nouadhibou and the Banc d'Arguin →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The natural history of the Banc d'Arguin begins with an unlikely meeting: that of the world's largest hot desert, the Sahara, with one of the most productive seas on the planet, the Atlantic off the Mauritanian coast. The key is an oceanographic phenomenon called upwelling: the trade winds push surface water out to sea and, in its place, cold, nutrient-rich water rises from the depths. This natural fertilisation triggers an explosion of plankton that feeds an enormous chain of life, from fish to birds and large marine mammals.
On top of this upwelling comes the particular geography of this coast: a vast shelf of shallow water, with extensive sandbanks, sand islands, channels and underwater seagrass meadows that the tide uncovers and covers twice a day. These tidal mudflats are among the richest ecosystems in existence: they work as a gigantic larder where millions of birds can feed on worms, crustaceans and molluscs, and as a nursery for countless fish species. The desert, paradoxically, does its part too, as the wind carries minerals and nutrients into the sea.
The result is a place of astonishing fertility on the very edge of the Sahara: where you would expect the emptiness of the desert meeting the sea, you find instead a hive of life. Since time immemorial, this richness has made the Banc d'Arguin coast a magnet for migratory birds from the northern hemisphere and the livelihood of a unique fishing people, the Imraguen.
The park takes its name from the island of Arguin, an islet off this coast that played a surprising role in the history of the great European voyages of discovery. In 1443-1445, Portuguese navigators in the service of Prince Henry 'the Navigator', pushing down the African coast, reached this area, and around 1445 they founded a fortified trading post on the island of Arguin: it was one of the very first European commercial settlements in sub-Saharan Africa, well before most of the enclaves on the Guinea coast.
Arguin became a key point in early Atlantic trade. Through it the Portuguese channelled the gold that arrived from the interior along the trans-Saharan routes, as well as gum arabic and other goods. But Arguin was also, sadly, one of the first points of the Atlantic trade in enslaved people: captives seized or bought in the region passed through its trading post, at the start of one of the darkest chapters in history. The enclave was so coveted that during the 17th and 18th centuries it changed hands several times between the Portuguese, the Dutch, the English, the French and even the German duchy of Brandenburg.
Over time, trade moved elsewhere and Arguin lost its importance, left as a historic ruin in the middle of a landscape that would regain its wild character. But that episode gave its name —Arguin, 'Banc d'Arguin'— to the whole of this coast and its sandbank, and it is a reminder that these remote waters stood, more than five hundred years ago, on the front line of European expansion across the world.
The human soul of the Banc d'Arguin is the Imraguen, a people of traditional fishermen who have lived on this coast for centuries and have developed an exceptional relationship with the sea. Their name is interpreted as 'those who gather' or 'those who fish'. Unlike the nomadic Moors of the desert, devoted to the camel and the caravan, the Imraguen live turned towards the Atlantic, in a handful of simple villages along the coast, and their livelihood revolves around mullet and other fish that abound in these waters.
Their most famous technique —known and studied all over the world— is fishing with the help of dolphins. When the great shoals of migrating mullet pass by, the fishermen strike the surface of the water with sticks to attract wild dolphins; the dolphins, cooperating of their own accord, corner the fish and drive them towards the shore, where the Imraguen catch them on foot with their nets. It is one of the very few documented partnerships of cooperative fishing between humans and dolphins, a relationship of trust handed down through generations. The Imraguen also use lateen-sail boats, the 'lanches', introduced from the Canary Islands at the end of the 19th century.
This fishing culture, sustainable and very low-impact, is one of the reasons for the immense value of the Banc d'Arguin and is recognised as part of its heritage. The Imraguen also make traditional products such as bottarga (salted, dried mullet roe, highly prized) and fish oil. Their way of life, however, faces challenges: pressure from industrial fishing in neighbouring waters, environmental change and the temptations of modernity. Among other things, the park seeks to protect both nature and this ancestral way of life.
The extraordinary natural value of the Banc d'Arguin began to be formally recognised in the 20th century. Bird counts revealed that this coast was home to one of the largest concentrations of migratory waterbirds in the world, an essential stopover on the route linking the Arctic and northern Europe with West Africa. To protect it, Mauritania created the Banc d'Arguin National Park in 1976, covering some 12.000 km² of land and sea, an immense area that makes it one of the largest marine and coastal parks in Africa.
Recognition culminated in 1989, when UNESCO inscribed the Banc d'Arguin on the World Heritage List for its outstanding universal value as a wintering ground for Palearctic birds and as a unique marine-desert ecosystem. The park is also listed among the wetlands of international importance under the Ramsar Convention. Scientific studies confirmed astonishing figures: more than two million wintering shorebirds, dozens of species, and a fish biomass that makes these shallows a crucial nursery for fisheries across the whole region.
The park's management, in the hands of the PNBA, seeks a difficult balance: conserving the ecosystem and wildlife, maintaining the sustainable way of life of the Imraguen (who are recognised as having the right to keep fishing in the traditional way), and holding back external threats, above all industrial overfishing in the surrounding waters, one of the most coveted fishing grounds in the world. It is a conservation model in which nature and the human community are protected together.
Today the Banc d'Arguin National Park is one of the great natural treasures of Africa and the world, and yet it remains a remote and little-visited destination, which is part of its magic. Every winter the marvel repeats itself: millions of birds arrive from half the globe to feed on its mudflats, flamingos and pelicans crowd the shallows, dolphins and turtles cruise its waters, and the Imraguen work as they have for generations. It is a place where nature is still in charge, ruled by the tides, the wind and the migrations.
Its fragility, however, is real. The main threat is the enormous fishing pressure on Mauritania's rich Atlantic fishing grounds, exploited by industrial fleets from the European Union, China and other countries under agreements with the state; overfishing in neighbouring waters affects the park's balance and the future of the Imraguen. Add to this climate change, pollution, infrastructure development on the coast and the difficult task of monitoring such a vast, sparsely populated territory. Preserving this sanctuary is an ongoing challenge.
For the traveller who makes it here —with effort, a permit and a 4x4—, the Banc d'Arguin offers a singular reward: being in one of the most important and least disturbed ecosystems on the planet, at the exact point where the Sahara dissolves into the ocean, among clouds of birds and the silence of the desert. A Portuguese trading post at the dawn of the age of discovery, the age-old home of the dolphin fishermen, the world's largest dining table for birds and a World Heritage Site, the Banc d'Arguin gathers on its remote coast a natural and human history of universal dimension.
