Nouakchott Audioguides

Nouakchott was barely a village before 1957, when Mauritanian independence planners selected this coastal site as the location for a new national capital, to be built from scratch on flat sand between the Sahara Desert and the Atlantic Ocean. The name translates from the Berber as 'place of winds,' which anyone who spends a day here will confirm as accurate. The city was designed to house 15,000 people. Due to severe droughts in the 1970s and 1980s that pushed nomadic and semi-nomadic populations off the land and into the capital, Nouakchott now holds nearly a quarter of Mauritania's entire population, around 1.5 million people, a demographic transformation that happened within a single generation and that the city's infrastructure has never fully caught up with.

The visual culture of Nouakchott is that of a Saharan city doing commerce with the Atlantic: men in traditional Mauritanian daraa robes in blues, greys, and whites, women in melhafas of printed fabric wrapped with elaborate technique, camels occasionally visible in the outer neighborhoods where the desert begins at the city's eastern edge.

The Fifth District market near the central mosque is the commercial heart, with stalls of dates, dried fish from the fishing port, silver jewelry, and the tie-dyed fabric that Mauritanian craftswomen work with extraordinary skill. The Mauritanian tea ceremony, three rounds of strong sweet mint tea poured from height to create foam, is the essential social ritual and accompanies every meeting, negotiation, and friendship.