Ouadane, the old caravan city above the palms

INSPIRE / SHORT STORY

id: 2023_mauritania-ouadane

slug: mauritania-ouadane

title: Ouadane, the old caravan city above the palms

type: inspire

region: North & West Africa

country: mauritania

angle: Experience

guide_wave: Brand

links_to_guide: none

status: draft

target_query: ouadane mauritania

meta_description: After the Eye of the Sahara we drove on to Ouadane - a preserved old stone town with no tourists, no tickets and no security. Fourteen of us, one Hilux.

source_file: 2023_mauritania-ouadane_source.docx

route_file: none

longform_file: 2023_mauritania-ouadane_longform.docx

photos_file: none

resolved: []

last_reviewed:

Ouadane, the old caravan city above the palms

We had learned by then that our Subarus would not survive the drive to the Eye of the Sahara - too much sand, too much rock. Finding a replacement was its own project: we could barely find one person willing to help us out with a car at all. So the solution was one Toyota Hilux, twelve of us, a driver and a guide. Fourteen people, one car.

After the Eye we drove on to Ouadane, which turns out to be two places: a small town where people live, and the old stone heritage town beside it. The old town was the main event - dry-stone streets and houses climbing the hillside, preserved well enough that you can read how life here used to work, room by room. And we had all of it entirely to ourselves. No other tourists. No tickets, no ropes, no security. Just us, walking through a town that everyone else had left behind.

The living town next door is small and cozy, the kind of place where time seems to have stopped. We walked it for a while, then folded ourselves back into the Toyota - all fourteen of us - for the long ride to Atar.

The whole day ran from 5:30 in the morning to about eight at night: the Eye, Ouadane, and hours of desert between everything. That is what keeps the stone town empty - it is a long way to go, on ground that eats ordinary cars. In Ouadane the emptiness is the luxury: a whole preserved town, and nobody in it but you.