Mauritania

Chinguetti was once the Sahara's seventh holy city of Islam — a caravan crossroads where pilgrims assembled for Mecca and scholars assembled libraries — and its old town of dry-stone houses and the square-minaret Friday mosque (13th century, still in use) now stands half-embraced by advancing dunes. The manuscript libraries are the reason to come: five family-kept collections whose custodians unwrap Qurans, astronomical treatises and legal texts copied over seven centuries, pages held together by inheritance and care in the desert air. Visits run on simple protocol — modest dress, the custodian's small fee (it maintains the collections), photography by permission, and unhurried attention, which the librarians repay with genuine scholarship. Ouadane, a half-day further into the Adrar, stacks its ruined stone old town down a hillside beside the living village; Tichitt and Oualata, far to the southeast with their painted façades, remain expedition targets for the most committed. The Adrar's oasis belt — Terjit's palm-shaded spring pools, Atar's market town as regional base — threads the circuit together.

Mauritania's desert is the Sahara at full vocabulary: the Erg Warane's dune seas rolling to the horizon beyond Chinguetti, black hammada plateaus split by canyons, and camel caravans still hauling salt as working transport rather than reenactment. Desert travel here follows expedition rules that the emptiness enforces — experienced local guides and 4×4s (or camel treks of one to several days arranged in Atar or Chinguetti), water and fuel margins, November-to-March timing (summer regularly exceeds 45°C), and camp nights under skies with zero light pollution that regular visitors rank above any other attraction. The Richat Structure — the 40-kilometre bullseye of concentric rock rings near Ouadane, the 'Eye of Africa' that astronauts photograph — is reached as a long guided day trip onto the plateau; from ground level it reads as vast ridgelines and polished geology underfoot, the full iris visible only from altitude, which is precisely its strange appeal: standing inside a landmark the scale of which only space can frame.

For 180 kilometres between Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the desert runs straight into the Atlantic across the Banc d'Arguin — UNESCO-listed shallows and islands where Saharan sand tips into some of the richest tidal ecosystems on earth. The numbers are planetary: over two million migratory shorebirds winter here on the East Atlantic flyway, with flamingos, white pelicans, spoonbills and tern colonies crowding the banks — the northern winter (November-March) is peak spectacle, aligning perfectly with the desert season. The park's human story is the Imraguen, the fishing communities with exclusive rights inside the boundaries, famous for a technique documented nowhere else: striking the water to summon wild dolphins that herd mullet shoals into their nets, a cooperation generations old. Visits run on park terms — permits and fees at the entry posts, 4×4 access to the ranger stations at Iwik or Ten Alloul, local pirogue or lanche sailing trips to the bird islands with Imraguen boatmen — and reward a night's camp: dawn over the mudflats is the birding hour and the park at its most otherworldly.

Mauritania's most famous journey is an industrial one: the iron-ore train from the Zouérat mines to Nouadhibou port — up to 2.5 kilometres and 200-plus wagons, among the longest trains on earth — which crosses the open Sahara daily and has become one of adventure travel's rites of passage. The honest mechanics: riding atop the loaded ore wagons is free, unticketed and exactly as raw as it sounds — twelve-plus hours exposed to ore dust that blackens everything, daytime heat, and desert night cold that demands serious layers, goggles, a scarf-wrapped face and secured kit; the single passenger car (cheap tickets, bench seating) offers the same journey with walls. Most riders board at Choum, where the train pauses mid-route in the small hours, and roll into Nouadhibou by morning; the reverse run carries empty wagons — cleaner, and the connoisseur's choice. It is uncomfortable, unforgettable and entirely real: the train exists to move ore, tolerates its riders, and grants in exchange the purest crossing of the Sahara that ordinary travellers can buy for nothing.