My most powerful personal memory of Mauritania is walking for two or three hours on a beach not far from the north end of Nouakchott for several hours and not meeting a single human being.
Mauritania is a very large country with a very small population. This sandy desert nation in the northwest of the African continent covers almost 400,000 square miles (1.5 times the size of France) but has a population of only 3,350,000 people (only 5 percent of France’s population). So I shouldn’t have been surprised by the vastness of the Mauritanian coastline and my lonely presence there.
Unlike the African coastal lands in Senegal and to the south, which are densely populated areas of the continent, Mauritania’s beaches are unspoiled and not yet polluted by resorts. Every now and then one comes across the small fishing village. Ecotourists will be delighted to discover that a large part of the coastline has been dedicated to nature and protected as a national resource, and one of these areas, the Banc d’Arguin National Park, is considered one of the best bird watching reserves on the continent.
I am Senegalese myself, from that beautiful coastal nation south of Mauritania, and have often visited Mauritania since childhood as my father was in the mining business and Mauritania’s economy is heavily dependent on extractive industries. Since I don’t drive, on my last trip I took a so-called “city taxi” from Dakar, sharing it with five others, for a fee of six thousand CFA francs (equivalent to about twelve US dollars). We crossed the Senegal River at Rosso, where a ferry took us to the other side. Our destination, of course, was Nouakchott, the transformed Atlantic fishing village that became the capital of Mauritania in 1957 with independence from France.
You can still see nomadic tents in Nouakchott, along with the new mosques and government buildings that international aid programs have helped build, and you can also see the ever-present Saharan sand, wave after wave of sand, invading the streets of the city and the public. spaces like a great tsunami of the limitless Sahara desert. The sand rain in Nouakchott is similar to the rain in other cities. A few times a year, massive sandstorms will deposit literally hundreds of tons of the fine, orange and sandy desert sand into the city.
Be sure to schedule a stop at Grill, which I consider the best restaurant in town, at Ilot K No 36 B, a wonderful place run by a lovely couple who are dedicated to using only the freshest local ingredients. The menu is mostly traditional French, with an emphasis on seafood, but they do have some of the best couscous in all of North Africa.
On the outskirts of the city there are a number of beaches used by locals and expats, of which two are among my favorites. Pichot Beach and Sultan Beach. Although rich coastal amenities of the kind found in Tunisia and Morocco, and even Senegal, are not available here, they both have modest restaurants (grilled seafood, cooked on charcoal) frequented by Nouakchott’s large diplomatic community and expats from the oil industry. If you go swimming, don’t forget that you are in the Atlantic Ocean, not the calm Mediterranean, and that tidal currents can be fierce and fatal.
Nouadibou, at the northern end of the border with the Spanish Sahara, once an industrial port for iron ore shipments from Mauritania’s gigantic iron mines, has reinvented itself as the charming fishing village that once It was before French colonization. now packed with wonderfully rustic seafood restaurants where you can dine on delicious treats that only hours before were alive at sea.
Many visitors to Mauritania report that it is like visiting North Africa at the turn of the century (they mean the turn of the 20th century, not the 21st), a land practically free of the debris of modern civilization. This is one of the last places in the world where views are uninterrupted by telephone poles, multi-lane asphalt roads, or cell phone towers. Think of scenes in The English Patient and you will understand the idea.
But it would be wrong to think that a small population in Mauritania means that there is no population. On the contrary, the nomadic civilization of Mauritania has created a series of caravan villages cited as a World Heritage Site, each of which points to a human past that dates back millennia. Roughly half of the three million people in Mauritania can claim to be Moorish, of Arab descent, while the other half are black Africans who migrated from the south.
This is a country that very few tourists will put on their agenda, and that is one of the reasons why it will always be at the top of my travel agenda for fun and education.
