My most powerful personal memory of Mauritania is walking for two or three hours on a beach not far from the northern tip 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 (a mere 5 percent of France’s population). So I shouldn’t have been surprised by the immensity of the Mauritanian coastline and my very 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 pristine and not yet tainted by resorts. From time to time one will find the small fishing village. Ecotourists will be pleased to discover that a large part of the coast has been dedicated to nature and protected as a national resource, and one of these areas, the Bank of Arguin National ParkIt is considered one of the best bird watching reserves on the continent.
I am Senegalese myself, from that beautiful southern coastal nation of Mauritania, and have visited Mauritania often since childhood, as my father was in the mining business and Mauritania’s economy relies heavily on extractive industries. Since I don’t drive, on my last trip I took a so-called “bush taxi” from Dakar, sharing it with five others, for a fare 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 fishing village on the Atlantic 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 helped build, and you can also see the ever-present sand from the Sahara, wave after wave of sand, invading the streets of the city and the public. spaces like a great tsunami of the Sahara desert without limits. The sand rain in Nouakchott is similar to the rain fall in other cities. A few times a year, massive sandstorms will deposit literally hundreds of tons of the fine, orange, sandy desert sand onto the city.
Be sure to schedule a stop at Grill, which I consider to be 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, emphasizing seafood, but they 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 favourites, Pichot Beach and sultan beach. Although the rich seaside comforts of the kind found in Tunisia and Morocco, and even Senegal, are not available here, both have modest restaurants (grilled, charcoal-cooked seafood) frequented by Nouakchott’s large diplomatic community and expatriates from the oil industry. If you go swimming, don’t forget that you are in the Atlantic Ocean, not the calm Mediterranean, and that the tidal currents can be fierce and fatal.
Nouadibou, on the northern edge of the border with Spanish Sahara, once a gritty industrial port for shipments of iron ore from Mauritania’s giant iron mines, has reinvented itself as the charming fishing village once time was before the French colonization. now packed with wonderfully rustic seafood restaurants where you can eat delicacies that only hours before were alive in the sea.
Many visitors to Mauritania report that it is like visiting North Africa at the turn of the century (they mean the early 20th century, not the 21st), a land virtually free of the detritus of modern civilization. This is one of the last places in the world where views aren’t interrupted by telephone poles, multi-lane paved roads, or cell phone towers. Think of scenes from The English Patient and you will get an idea.
But it would be a mistake to think that a small population in Mauritania means that there is no population. Rather, the nomadic civilization of Mauritania has created a series of caravan villages cited as World Heritage Sites, each pointing to a human past stretching back millennia. About half of Mauritania’s three million people can claim ethnic Moorish and 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.