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Some travellers go to places for what can be visited and others for what can be seen. If you belong to the second group, there is a line on the west coast of Africa you have probably looked at on a map at some point: the strip where the planet's largest hot desert stops dead against the Atlantic. Nouakchott sits right on that line.
01 A line on the map
What makes this stretch of coast special is that there is no transition. In most of the world, between a desert and an ocean there is a belt of vegetation, a fertile plain or at least a zone of scrub. Not here: the bands of dunes reach the shore and the next element of the landscape is already water.
02 The two edges worth seeing
The whole trip fits into two scenes: the beach where the pirogues work and the street where the dune eats the asphalt.
The first scene is on the western edge, at the fishing beach in the El Mina district. There the artisanal fleet operates without a quay: the pirogues are pushed into the water through the surf and are run back onto the sand with the catch. They are wooden boats of up to twenty metres, hand-painted one by one.
The second scene is at the opposite end, at any point on the eastern outskirts. There you see the sand front advancing over the city: dunes arriving from the interior, sand covering the verge and eating into the lane, and new avenues laid out towards a plain where there is still nothing.
03 The five months when it works
Planning here is simpler than in almost any destination, because one of the two usual variables disappears: it rains an average of 8.3 days a year, with 95 millimetres in total. Rain, quite simply, does not enter the equation. All that is left is to decide about the heat.
The window is November to March. In those five months the mean high runs from 29.1 to 34.0 degrees, nights sit between 14.5 and 19.7, and relative humidity stays between 35 % and 43 %. December and January are the best: dry air, reasonable heat and genuinely cool nights.
04 What has to be accepted
The first limit should be said plainly: there is no heritage here. Work on the city began in March 1958 and before that there was only a fishing settlement. There is no old town, no historic architecture, no monumental ensemble. If you travel to see that, this destination has nothing for you.
The second is the amount of programme, which is the direct consequence of the first. Two nights covers the two edges that justify the trip. Stretching it to five days adds nothing: it is a destination of scene, not itinerary, and works far better slotted into a wider route than as an end point.
And there is the dust, which appears in no table. Haze can whiten the sky for days on end, cut visibility and leave a fine layer of sand over everything. It cancels nothing, but it changes a good deal of what you see and photograph, and is a nuisance if your airways are sensitive.
With those three points accepted, what remains is exactly what the map promised: a city set on the line where the Sahara touches the Atlantic, with a fleet of painted pirogues launching off the sand on one side and the dunes coming in over the asphalt on the other. Little programme and one sharp argument.
