Atar

Atar grew where the plain meets the southern wall of the Adrar plateau, at a break in the escarpment with wells and date palms — a natural halt on the routes between the caravan towns above and the pastures and markets to the south. Long before it became a town of any size, the oasis and its groves supported herding families and a trade in dates, and the Almoravid-era site at Azougui, a short way to the north-west, shows how old settlement in this corner of the Adrar is. A mosque built in 1674 still stands in the town.

The emirate of the Adrar ruled the plateau before the French arrived, and Atar was one of its centres. French forces moved in during the conquest of Mauritania, and after the emirate was subdued in 1912 the French made the town their administrative and military base for the whole region, laying out a fort, an airstrip and the beginnings of a grid of streets. The airfield became a stop on air routes across the Sahara, used in the Second World War by Allied aircraft on the Cairo-Dakar route, and it is the ancestor of today's airport.

After independence in 1960 Atar remained the capital of the Adrar region. The droughts of the 1970s and 1980s destroyed much of the nomadic economy around it and drove herding families into the town, swelling its population and its outskirts, while others left for Nouakchott. From the 1990s the Adrar's small tourist trade gave the town a second income, with visitors arriving in the cool season; that traffic collapsed after security scares in the late 2000s and has since partly returned, with flights from France landing at the airport again from December 2017.

Atar is a Moorish town, Hassaniya-speaking, and it works the way the desert north does: slowly, through family and lineage, with time given to greetings and to tea. The three rounds of strong sweet green tea, brewed on a charcoal stove and poured from a height to raise foam, punctuate the whole day, in shops and garages as much as at home, and a transaction that skips them is thought brusque.

Because it is the regional capital and the road head, the town is more mixed than the villages above it. Officials, soldiers, teachers and traders come from all over Mauritania, Haratin and Afro-Mauritanian families live alongside the older Moorish ones, and the market brings herders in from the desert and drivers up from Nouakchott. That gives Atar a working, practical character rather than a scholarly one; the manuscript tradition belongs to Chinguetti and Ouadane, and Atar is where their supplies and their visitors come through.

Dress is conservative and distinctive — the loose pale daraa for men, the wrapped malahfa in bright printed cloth for women — and the day is set by prayer times and the heat, with a long pause in the afternoon and a second active period after dark. Poetry and sung Hassaniya verse are valued here as elsewhere in the north. The great social season is the Guetna, the summer date harvest, when families move out to the palm groves to eat fresh dates and visit relatives.

Atar has a population of about 35,000, which makes it one of the larger towns of the interior and by far the biggest place in the Adrar. Its economy rests on being the regional capital: government offices, the hospital, schools, the army and police, alongside the market, transport and garages, the date gardens and a small tourist trade of guides, drivers and auberge keepers in the cool months. Many households also keep animals or a share of a palm grove.

Nearly everything consumed in the Adrar passes through the town, arriving by truck from Nouakchott and going on by pickup to the plateau villages. Water comes from wells and boreholes and is the constant preoccupation, for the gardens above all. Electricity, mobile coverage and fuel are available but not always reliable, and sand drifts across roads and yards after windy days.

The rhythm is early mornings, a shut-down through the worst afternoon heat and a long, sociable evening in the streets around the market. Families that lost their herds in the droughts still live on the edges of town in compounds of concrete and tent cloth. The persistent pressures are the same as elsewhere in the Sahara: young people leaving for Nouakchott, uncertain work, and an economy that depends on rains far to the south and on a visitor season that can vanish with a change in travel advice.

Atar eats simply and well. The staples are rice or couscous served with goat, mutton or camel in a sauce of tomato and onion with whatever vegetables the trucks have brought, eaten from a shared dish with the right hand. Dried meat, cut in strips and hardened in the sun, keeps without refrigeration and is cooked into sauces on the road. For a feast or a family gathering a whole animal is roasted as méchoui.

Dates are the town's own product, from the groves along the wadi and the oases around it: eaten fresh in the harvest season and dried or pressed into paste for the rest of the year, and offered to any guest with tea. Camel's milk, fresh or soured, is widely drunk, and zrig — soured milk thinned with water and sweetened — is the everyday cold drink in the heat. Grilled meat, fried fish brought up from the Atlantic and bowls of rice are sold around the market.

French bread survives from colonial days and is baked in small bakeries across the town, sold warm in the morning and eaten with jam, cheese or a little oil. Tea closes everything: green tea, mint and a great deal of sugar, poured repeatedly between pot and glass, served in three successive rounds. Alcohol is illegal in Mauritania, so tea, water, soft drinks and juices are the whole drinks list.