Diawling National Park is one of Mauritania's best-kept natural secrets: a world of water and birds in the far southwest of the country, where the Senegal River opens into a delta before flowing into the Atlantic. In a country we associate with desert and dunes, Diawling surprises with marshes, lagoons, mangroves and floodplains that fill up every winter with flamingos, pelicans, herons and tens of thousands of migratory birds.
Created in 1991, the park was set up to restore an ecosystem that had been deeply altered by the construction of the large Diama dam at the river's mouth. Through a system of dykes and sluice gates that imitates the natural flood, the wetlands were brought back, and with them the wildlife, the vegetation and the resources of local communities. It is a remarkable example of ecological restoration and water management, as well as a paradise for birdwatching.
Diawling is the Mauritanian twin of the famous Djoudj National Park, on the other bank of the river in Senegal: together they form one of the most important waterbird reserves in the world and a Transboundary Biosphere Reserve. This guide tells you what wildlife to see, when to go, how to get there from Nouakchott and how to make the most of a visit to this Sahelian wetland, a perfect green, watery counterpoint to the deserts of the country's north.
For millennia the Senegal River delta was a vast seasonal wetland: every summer the river's flood covered the plains and set off an explosion of life — fish, birds, pasture, flood-recession farming — that the riverside peoples lived on. The construction of the Diama dam near the river mouth in the 1980s, to stop seawater moving upstream and to secure irrigation, upset that natural cycle and degraded the wetlands on the Mauritanian bank. To reverse this, Diawling National Park was created in 1991; using dykes and sluice gates it artificially recreates the flood and has managed to restore the ecosystem and the birds. The story of the delta, the dam and this pioneering restoration is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The capital built from scratch in 1960 on a stretch of dunes: today a sand-swept metropolis where the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa mix, between the Atlantic and the desert.
Read the history of Nouakchott and the Atlantic coast →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
To understand Diawling National Park, you have to start with the Senegal River, one of the great waterways of the western Sahel. Rising in the highlands of Guinea, the river runs for thousands of kilometres before reaching the Atlantic, and in its final stretch it opens into a vast delta shared between Mauritania (the north bank) and Senegal (the south bank). For thousands of years, that delta followed the rhythm of the flood: every summer, with the rains inland, the river burst its banks and flooded huge plains, and every winter the water withdrew, leaving fertile land and lagoons behind.
That yearly pulse of flooding and retreat was the key to everything. With each flood the grasslands flourished, fish bred, millions of birds arrived and the riverside communities lived from an economy perfectly adapted to it: fishing, transhumant herding, gathering plants and what is known as 'recession farming', which uses the moisture left by the retreating water to sow crops without irrigation. The Senegal delta was one of the richest and most productive wetlands in all of West Africa, an oasis of life on the edge of the great desert.
On the Mauritanian bank, this part of the Trarza region near the river mouth was a world apart from the rest of the country. While Mauritania was, and still is, overwhelmingly desert, here fresh water, marshes and birds created a different world, closer to green sub-Saharan Africa than to the Sahara. That natural treasure, however, was about to be deeply transformed by human hands.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the countries of the Senegal River basin (Mauritania, Senegal and Mali, grouped in the Organisation for the Development of the Senegal River, OMVS) launched major hydraulic works to tame the river, secure irrigation, generate electricity and hold back the droughts that were devastating the Sahel. Two dams were at the heart of the plan: Manantali, upstream in Mali, and Diama, built near the river mouth and completed in 1986.
The Diama Dam had one key job: to stop seawater from coming in. In the dry season, salt water travelled up the river and salinised the land, and the dam was meant to guarantee fresh water for irrigation and drinking. But by putting up that barrier and regulating the flow, the dam deeply disrupted the delta's natural cycle of flooding. On the Mauritanian bank, the plains that used to flood every year no longer received water the way they had; the wetlands dried out or degraded, the vegetation shrank back, fish and birds declined, and the communities that depended on the flood watched their way of life fall apart.
It was a classic and painful case of the unintended effects of large-scale works: in trying to control the water for some purposes, an entire ecosystem was damaged, along with the traditional economy that relied on it. The Mauritanian delta, one of the country's most valuable wetlands, was dying. Faced with this environmental and social disaster, the idea arose of stepping in to restore it, and that gave birth to one of the most interesting ecological restoration projects in Africa.
In 1991, the government of Mauritania officially created Diawling National Park on the right (north) bank of the lower Senegal River delta. Its goal was as ambitious as it was new: not just to protect what was left, but to actively restore the wetland the dam had degraded. The central idea was clever: if the dam had cut off the natural flood, a system of dykes and sluice gates would be built to recreate it artificially, letting water in and out in a controlled way to mimic the old seasonal flooding cycle.
The project, backed by international conservation bodies such as the IUCN and by cooperation from the Netherlands, among others, was a pioneering example of wetland restoration guided by both ecological and social criteria. The aim was to bring back the different environments (freshwater, brackish and saltwater) that supported the area's biodiversity, and to do it with the local communities in mind. They were involved in managing the park and once again benefited from fishing, harvesting reeds and plants, and grazing their livestock.
The results were remarkable. Within a few years, thanks to water management through the dykes, the marsh vegetation and mangroves turned green again, fish returned to the lagoons, and birds (flamingos, pelicans, herons, migratory ducks) came back in their tens of thousands. Diawling became a case study cited around the world on how to restore an ecosystem damaged by a major hydraulic project while giving resources and dignity back to the people who depend on it.
Diawling is not alone. Right across the river, on the Senegalese bank, lies Djoudj National Bird Sanctuary. Created in 1971 and listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it is one of the most famous bird sanctuaries in Africa and the world. Both parks protect the same great ecosystem of the Senegal delta and, over time, began coordinating to manage it together: in 2005 the Transboundary Biosphere Reserve of the Senegal River Delta was created, bringing Diawling (Mauritania) and Djoudj (Senegal) together under UNESCO's MAB programme.
This partnership recognises an ecological truth: birds know nothing of borders. Millions of waterbirds use the delta as a stopover and wintering ground on their journey along the great East Atlantic Flyway, crossing from one bank to the other depending on conditions. Diawling and Djoudj are really two sides of the same treasure, and together they hold one of the largest concentrations of waterbirds on the planet, with hundreds of thousands of birds in peak season.
This cross-border cooperation made the Senegal delta a model of shared environmental management between two countries, something both rare and very valuable. For Mauritania, Diawling is also a symbol: proof that a desert country is also home to wetlands of global importance, and that damaged nature can recover when there is the will and good science behind it.
Today Diawling National Park is a restored and protected natural area, a haven of water and birds in south-western Mauritania, and an essential stop for birdwatchers who venture out to this little-visited corner of the country. Its story sets it apart from almost any other park in Africa: it is not a piece of untouched nature that was simply put under protection, but an ecosystem wounded by a major hydraulic project and brought back to life by water engineering guided by ecology.
That does not mean its future is guaranteed. Diawling remains a fragile and largely artificial ecosystem that depends on constant management of its dykes and sluice gates, and on a balance that is never easy between the needs of irrigation, fishing, livestock and conservation. Climate change, pressure on water, invasive species (such as certain aquatic plants that are spreading through the delta) and poverty in the local communities are ongoing challenges. But for more than three decades, the park has shown that restoration works.
For travellers, visiting Diawling means looking into a story of damage and repair, and a landscape that breaks every cliché about Mauritania: here the desert turns into marshland, and the silence of the dunes gives way to the noise of thousands of birds taking off over the water at dawn. It is a reminder that this country, so closely linked with sand, also holds one of the most important wetlands in West Africa, the result of nature, engineering and a bold commitment to bringing life back.
