Ouadane

The staging post for the salt slabs coming out of Idjil

Ouadane sits on the southern edge of the Adrar Plateau in the desert of central Mauritania, 93 km northeast of Chinguetti, and its old town, though ruined, still stands substantially intact, with a small modern settlement outside the gate. It owes its existence to salt. Slabs cut from the Idjil sebkha, roughly 240 km to the northwest, came through Ouadane on their way south across the Sahara, and the town grew into the staging post and warehouse of that trade, and perhaps of the gold trade before it.

Its early history is uncertain. In the 11th century the geographer al-Bakri described a caravan route that carried gold between Tamdoult in Morocco and Aoudaghost at the southern edge of the desert in the days of the Ghana Empire, and the French historian Raymond Mauny argued in 1961 that it ran through Ouadane, though others placed it farther east. The first certain mention comes from the Portuguese in the middle of the 15th century. Gomes Eanes de Zurara called it the most important town of the Adrar and the only one with a surrounding wall. Fifty years later Valentim Fernandes described its trade in slabs of salt in detail, and Duarte Pacheco Pereira, writing around 1505, counted some 300 hearths, perhaps 1,500 to 1,800 people. By Pereira's account the Portuguese themselves built a trading post here in 1487, hoping to tap the trans-Saharan trade in gold, salt and slaves; it seems not to have lasted. In the 16th century the Moroccans, reaching for control of the salt and gold trade, sent military expeditions to occupy Ouadane in 1543 and 1544 and again in 1584, before going on to take Taghaza and destroy the Songhay Empire.

The ruins fall in two parts. Tegherbeyat, the upper quarter, is almost certainly the oldest; its mosque has vanished. Below it stands the mosque of the lower town, probably built in the 15th century as the town expanded. Some of its horseshoe arches still stand, and patches of clay plaster cling to its walls, suggesting it was abandoned only in the 19th century. Its terrace rested on five rows of arches, with an outdoor mihrab and a courtyard for worship in the heat.

UNESCO inscribed Ouadane in 1996 with Chinguetti, Tichitt and Oualata as the Ancient Ksour, caravan towns of courtyard houses packed along narrow lanes around a mosque with a square minaret. The town is also the nearest to the Richat Structure, the vast circular landmark visible from space.