Chinguetti

Chinguetti is said to have been founded in AD 777, and by the 11th century it was a trading centre for the Sanhaja Berber confederation from which the Almoravids came. After two centuries of decline it was effectively re-founded in the 13th century as a fortified halt for trans-Saharan caravans and a gathering point for pilgrims of the Maghreb heading east to Mecca. It lay on the routes that carried salt and dates south and gold, grain and enslaved people north, and its wells and palm groves made it a place where long desert crossings could be organised.

What made Chinguetti's name was learning rather than trade. Its mahadras, the tented and household schools of the desert, taught the Quran, law, grammar, astronomy, mathematics and medicine, and scholars carried the town's name abroad, so that the whole of present-day Mauritania came to be known in the Arab world as Bilad Shinqit, the land of Chinguetti. The manuscripts families copied and bought are still held privately in the town, which became a holy place in its own right for pilgrims who could not reach Arabia and is sometimes described as the seventh holy city of Islam.

The caravan economy faded as European shipping and then French rule redirected trade, and the town shrank; Atar, at the western edge of the plateau, is now the capital of the region. In the twentieth century drought and the collapse of nomadic herding drew people to Nouakchott. The old quarter was inscribed in 1996 as part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Ancient Ksour of Ouadane, Chinguetti, Tichitt and Oualata. Sand remains the town's steadiest adversary: dunes have covered outlying houses and gardens, and keeping lanes and palm groves clear is constant work.

Chinguetti's identity rests on the manuscript libraries, which are family property rather than public institutions. Five of them are counted as important collections of scientific and Quranic texts, many of the volumes dating from the later Middle Ages, inherited through generations and stored in wooden chests and cupboards against sand, insects and damp, and the head of the family shows them to visitors and explains what each one is. The works cover Quranic science, law, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, grammar and poetry, and their survival in a small desert town is the reason the place is known internationally.

The town is Moorish and Hassaniya-speaking, and its manners are those of the desert north: long greetings, questions about family and health before anything else, and the three rounds of green tea that measure out a visit. Poetry recited and sung in Hassaniya is valued, and religious learning still carries social weight. Dress is conservative — the wide daraa robe for men, the wrapped malahfa for women — and the day is organised around prayer times and the heat.

Visitors are a small but old part of town life, and the Adrar's tourist season runs through the cool months. Guides, drivers and auberge keepers are mostly local, and the etiquette expected of outsiders is straightforward: ask before photographing anyone, dress plainly, take time over greetings, and treat the mosque and the libraries as what they are, a working place of worship and private family property.

Chinguetti is a town of a few thousand people — 4,800 at the 2013 census — and most of them live in the ville nouvelle rather than the old quarter, which has emptied steadily as houses fell to sand and families moved across the wadi or to Atar and Nouakchott. Households live from dates and small irrigated gardens, goats and camels, government jobs in the school and clinic, small shops, and work connected to visitors: guiding, driving, running an auberge or cooking in one.

Water and sand shape the daily routine. Wells and pumps supply the gardens and the houses, and clearing drifted sand from doorways, lanes and palm trunks is ordinary work rather than an emergency. Electricity and mobile coverage reach the town but are not constant, and almost everything else — fuel, flour, vegetables, building materials — arrives by pickup from Atar.

The rhythm of the day starts very early, pauses through the worst of the afternoon heat, and picks up again towards evening, when people sit outside and tea goes round. Summer belongs to the date harvest, when families spend weeks in the palm groves. The long-term questions facing the town are the same ones it has faced for a century: how many young people stay, how much of the ksar can be kept standing, and whether the dunes can be held back.

Eating in Chinguetti follows the desert pattern: dates, milk, grain and meat, with little variety and considerable ceremony. Dates from the local groves are eaten fresh at the harvest and dried or pressed into paste for the rest of the year, and a bowl of them with a pot of tea is the standard welcome. Camel's milk, fresh or soured, is drunk where herds are near, and zrig — soured milk thinned with water and sweetened — is the everyday cold drink.

Cooked meals are usually couscous, rice or pasta served with goat or camel in a sauce of tomato, onion and whatever vegetables have come up from Atar, eaten from a shared dish with the right hand while seated on mats. Strips of dried meat keep without refrigeration and are cooked into sauces. For a feast or a large family gathering, a whole animal is roasted as méchoui. Bread is baked in the town or sometimes in hot sand.

Green tea closes everything. It is brewed strong with a great deal of sugar and fresh mint on a small charcoal stove, poured from a height between pot and glass to raise a head of foam, and served in three successive rounds, each lighter than the last, over the better part of an hour. Alcohol is illegal in Mauritania, so tea, water and soft drinks are what there is.