From Banc d'Arguin to the Ends of Mauritanian Adrâr

Early in the morning, we board the Canarian lanches used by Imragen fishermen to move silently through the channels between the islands.
The exceptional richness of Banc d'Arguin is made up of its very important avifauna. Myriads of birds take flight at our approach, forming incredibly beautiful movements in the sky. Marine mammals are also present. It is not uncommon to see dolphins and, with a lot of luck, killer whales.

The Ben Amira monolith is one of the most breathtaking places in Mauritania. The enormous mass of granite rock rises over 600m.
With the sand dunes surrounding it, it provides an excellent Saharan landscape. Ben Amira is the largest monolith in Africa and the third largest in the world, after Uluru and Mount Augustus located in Australia.

On foot, we set off to explore this iconic Saharan site. To the north, the great dunes of the erg Maghteir stretch out while a natural amphitheater of cliffs surrounds us.

The El Beyyed corridor presents, over nearly 20km towards El Ghallaouiyya, a considerable quantity of lithic material. The region offers some of the main biface and worked pebble sites in western Sahara. The multiple rock art sites here represent samples of so-called "Ethiopian" fauna such as giraffes, elephants, rhinoceroses... This fauna is believed to have disappeared from the area approximately 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. El Beyyed is located at the foot of the great dhar of the Adrâr and, to the north, develops an immense and powerful erg: the Maghteïr.

The flattened dome of Guelb Er Richât, which appears during the secondary period, is located at the borders of the dark mountains of the Adrâr mauritanien, to the west, and the vast expanses of stones, rocky slabs and dunes of the Taoudenni basin, to the east.
The strange system of concentric ridges of the Richât is so impressive that it now appears on all maps, even on small scales.
Richât is the plural of richa (feather), a term that perfectly describes the appearance of its ridges whose leeward flanks are striped with tongues of sand and which dominate the deep plains where goats and camels graze… when, by chance, it has rained.
Because of its very size, it was only revealed quite late, by professor Théodore Monod in 1934.
Indeed, no one, whether coming from the rugged plateaus of the north or the dunes of the Majabat Al Koubra (Monod, 1958), to the south and south-east, could imagine that these low ridges are organized into such a perfect concentric system, vaguely elliptical of 22 km and 25 km in diameter, emerging from a window of 45 km, the Taguenzé, open in the sandstone plateau.

The ksar of Wadâne, (Ouadâne) which was founded, it is said, the same year as Tichîtt (1141), derives its name from the Arabic word meaning "two riverbeds" (wadân). The details according to which these two wadis would be the wadi of dates and the wadi of sciences are a great credit to the city.
The ancient city is mentioned in writing in the middle of the 15th century in a Portuguese travel report, but it remains difficult to get a precise idea of the city's beginnings despite its position on the western axis of trans-Saharan caravan trade.
Wadâne is a dense urban center, of the ksar type, formerly surrounded by a very secure fortified enclosure that resisted all foreign forces until the arrival of the French.
The dominant tribes are the Kounta, the Ida or El Hadj, the Chorfa, the Amgârîj and the Aghzazir.

The semi-nomadic camp of El Kheouiya is settled there during major droughts. The camp, for a few years now, has been organizing itself: development of goat and camelid breeding (from 2 camels in 1993, now a herd of over 70 animals), creation of a school in 1994, birth of a small palm grove associated with gardens in 1999 and, now, a few solid structures.
"But we, we remain under the tent" Atfeil, the camp leader, assures us…
The bonds we maintain with the different families of the camp are close and greatly friendly.

Chinguetti was founded by the Ida Ouali around 1525, upstream from Abweyr, which has now disappeared and was itself created in 1261.
The probable etymology of the toponym shingitî would be: well of the horse, from Soninké: si: well + n: of + gede: horse.
Chinguetti was the most active commercial center and the most important city in the Western Sahara. It was considered by Mauritanians as the 7th holy city of Islam with its 11 mosques, its 100 wells and its circle of scholars.
In 1675, a massacre perpetrated by part of the Ida-ou-Ali led to the breakup of the group whose survivors founded another ksar in the Tagant: Tidjikja.
Today only one mosque remains and the memory of prosperous periods…
The main tribes that make up its population are the Ida-ou-Ali, the Laghlal and the Oulad Gheilan.

With their narrow and winding streets, their numerous dead ends, their low and dark houses made of local materials, their almost complete absence of squares and communal spaces, Chinguetti and Wadâne have the structure of old ksour densely huddled around their mosques.

An ice deposit warehouse in Adrâr!
Thesmall mountain of Zarga is an esker about a hundred meters high and approximately 50 kilometers long.
It is the result of an incredible geomorphological adventure dating back to the dawn of time, 440 million years ago (late Ordovician).
Today, the mega-fossil ridge of Zarga marks the western end of the Warane erg. It blocks the flow of sands coming from the confines of the Chech erg.
Thwarted by this natural barrier, the Warane erg then changes name to become the Amatlich, then the Akchar before disappearing into the waters of the Atlantic Ocean.