Archaeology handicrafts and science and technology sites to visit Mauritania

4 km north of the railway line between Nouadhibou and Choûm, at kilometer 395, Ben Amira is one of the most breathtaking places in Mauritania. It is the largest monolith in Africa (over 600 m) and the third largest in the world, after Uluru and Mount Augustus in Australia. The legend says that originally there was only one monolith and that during the "divorce", the man would have stayed with the 2 children (the 2 smaller monoliths), while the woman, Aisha, would have left with her servant to settle 5 km further...

A beautiful place to bivouac: many trees, surrounded by beautiful dunes. In fact, it is rather the only place to bivouac! You will even find a well, which is rare in the surroundings. The GPS coordinates of this site are: 21°07'34" N, 11°22'41 "W. Now, take a little height, go up again, and imagine your tent, planted in the area of Guelb er-Richat... For this reason alone, the bivouac is worth it at this place! It is said that it is in the wooded camp that Théodore Monod joined his wife, after having explored the crater and its secrets.

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.

Even if it is extremely difficult to visit them if you don't know a member of the SNIM staff, it is worth a try. In an atmosphere charged with a reddish dust, you wander under an unbearable heat, consequence of the sun but also of the furnaces, while taking care of the steel monsters which carry the ore and while startling with each shooting of mines... An impression of the end of the world, Dantesque and terrifying at the same time! Unfortunately, these mines are the scene of many work accidents, most of the time quite serious.

Mauritanian cement, otherwise known as banco, is used as a binder for building houses. In Chinguetti, it has been extracted for centuries from a mine located less than a kilometer southeast of the city. One can access underground galleries of several hundred meters, by letting oneself go down to the bottom of a well hung on a beast skin. It is obviously not of any rest, but the discovery of these labyrinthine galleries is astonishing. They are several meters high in some places and leave barely enough space to crawl in others.

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.