BANCO MINES

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.