Things to see and do South

Welcome to Diawling National Park! The website is quite extensive: it describes the conservation and development actions carried out by the park team, as well as the presentation and history of the park. A section is entitled "Visit the DNP", which will be useful to get practical information: how to get there, where to stay, what excursions are possible, what handicrafts are presented, how to behave in the park...

Accessible from Kaédi by a good 115 km track, the Foum Gleita dam is located near M'Bout, a large agricultural village, a former colonial post that has kept a very particular architecture. This impressive work of 43 m height and 110 m length holds 500 million m³ of water. Completed in 1984, it has allowed the irrigation of more than 2,500 hectares of land, and facilitates the cultivation of rice for the inhabitants of the region. It is the largest dam in Mauritania, located on the Gorgol River.

Kaédi, the city where many Mauritanian ethnic groups live, has given birth to a colorful market. You must see this melting pot where Arabs-Berbers and Africans-Mauritanians of all origins and almost all conditions mix. These different populations have brought their goods and crafts, which are piled up in this market in which you can get lost because it is so well supplied! Fruits and vegetables, fish, fabrics, leather work, dairy products, cereals, everyday objects and others... A change of scenery and authenticity guaranteed!

On the track that leads from Nbeika to Matmata, about 25 km, we find on the left, a few kilometers before Matmata, a dozen astonishing small constructions of about 1.5 m high. They are granaries, still used nowadays, which would have been built by farmers, the Gangari, who lived in the region about 2 000 years ago. They seem to have been the ancestors of the Soninke. These cylindrical stone constructions, erected near cultivable areas (at the time), allowed them to store seeds.

Like Ouadane, Oualata and Chinguetti, Tichitt is full of century-old manuscripts with delicate illuminations, witnesses of a past and splendid period, during which the religious studied Islam, sciences and other fields, in the greatest seriousness. You can visit one of these libraries, modest in appearance but containing treasures of calligraphy, preserved with great difficulty for centuries. A guard will put on thick gloves before gently manipulating the pages of these manuscripts before your amazed eyes.

It dates from the ^14th century, but some parts, such as the minaret, were restored in the early ^20th century. It is in the neighborhood of the mosque that the last old houses of Tichit remain, beautifully decorated and with the typical architecture of Saharan ksour . In 2013, while Tichit hosted the Festival of Ancient Cities, the event allowed the rehabilitation of one hundred houses Tichittoises. The mosque has also benefited from this event, the large number of participants and guests have honored him.

Created in 1996, they produced their first harvest in 1999. Their goal is to diversify the food supply of the inhabitants of Oualata, to provide a complementary source of income to the 60 families who operate them and to fix the population in the region thanks to 2 reservoirs which, in the hot season, work with solar panels. If you have the chance to meet one of the 2 engineers who work there, visit them with him, you will be amazed. The water is first pumped from a non-permanent water table, raised and then stored in a reservoir, the pressure exerted making it naturally flow back down to the gardens.

Then, the irrigation system set up allows to save water by allocating to each plant the flow that is necessary for it. This technique has made it possible to introduce species that would have been incompatible with the climate of the region. We discover date palms, jujube trees, baobabs, lemon trees, mandarin trees, mango trees and even vines! Vegetables are not forgotten with tomatoes, beans and onions consumed fresh on the spot or dried. So much so that the market garden production is today superior to the consumption of the inhabitants! Fruits and vegetables are exported to Néma. The gardens also produce compost from camel dung, medicinal plants and natural insecticides. This vegetation attracts a lot of game, including a few hares, which are an important food supplement for those who trap them.

Like the three other ancient cities of Mauritania, Ouadane, Chinguetti and Tichitt, Oualata is home to treasures in its library, preserved by chance and with care by the inhabitants through time, sometimes with the means at hand! In the room to the right are old manuscripts belonging to the four families of Oualata. Opposite is the library of Taleb Boubekar, traditional chief of the city, who died around 1915. This library is full of centuries old writings, vestiges of another time.

In the old city, you must visit the small store that Meîja has installed. She explains how the women of Oualata reproduce the houses and the decorations specific to this city, down to the smallest details. Indeed, it is the women who take care of the superb wall decoration of the houses of Oualata, the red capital of the Mauritanian desert. Geometric shapes drawn with clay, whose miniature reproductions are known throughout the country, and can serve as beautiful souvenirs.

There is no need to show you the way to get there: perched on a promontory, you can see it clearly while you are still 30 minutes from Oualata. Built in 1912, it successively housed the French army during the pacification of the region, then political prisoners from the independence of Mauritania. Since 1990, the authorities have closed this prison. The triangular building is impressive and appears to be in a perfect state of preservation, seen from the outside. Inside, around the courtyard, the prisoners' cells are scattered. It is hard to imagine what the conditions of the men incarcerated here were like not so long ago. A small opening allowing a little light to pass through, a living space reduced to a minimum, because the cells were crowded, the diseases, the heat and the mistreatment must have made the life expectancy very limited. One comes out of this fort with shivers down one's spine.

It is possible to admire Oualata by taking the stairs on the left, just after the entrance of the fort. You are then on the roof of the cells! Going back down from the fort towards Oualata, on the right, the French cemetery shelters a dozen graves, among which the one of Bonnel de Mézières who administered the region at the beginning of the ^XXth century. Passionate about archaeology, he contributed greatly to the excavations carried out at Aoudaghost and Koumbi Saleh.

Warning: Before considering a visit, inquire about the feasibility of the site with local tourism professionals.

Aleg is flanked, towards the pontoon, by a depression, vast but not very pronounced, filled by a lake whose surface area varies according to the rainfall. Fed by the Katchi wadi and its endoreic watershed of 3,800 km², this body of water would be, like the lakes of Rkîz (in Mauritania) and Guiers (in Senegal), located on the former course of the Senegal River. In this basin, surrounded by dunes and quicksand, many migratory birds, including teal, pintail and pike-perch, gather during the northern winter.

The museum, adjacent to the city's library, is a motley collection of very interesting objects, but it needs some tidying up and cleaning! It will be easier to enjoy the visit of this site if you are accompanied by a serious and well-known guide, for a small fee of about 1,000 MRU. Otherwise, you may miss the local traditions and nomadic customs represented by many household utensils and objects. Nice view from the terrace of this traditional house.

It is Zeinebou Abdel Kader who manages the museum today and takes care of the visits to the library, which no longer has a curator since the death of Mohamed Lemrabott Ould Taleb who was in charge. Tidjikdja was an important center of religious education. More than five thousand manuscripts make up its library, covering Islamic jurisprudence, medicine, social sciences, Arabic grammar, poetry, esotericism, astrology, mysticism...