Nouadhibou

The peninsula was a fishing ground and a landmark for sailors long before there was a town: Portuguese navigators charted Cap Blanc in the 15th century, and the bay behind it, the Baie du Lévrier, offered the only real shelter on a coast of open surf. A small fishing port held in turn by the Portuguese, the Dutch and the French was renamed Port-Étienne in 1907, after a former French minister of the colonies, using it for fishing and as a staging point on the air and sea routes down the African coast. It remained a tiny settlement of a few hundred people for decades.

Two industries made the modern town. The first was iron ore: from the early 1960s a 704-kilometre railway, opened in 1963, was driven across the desert from the mines at Zouérat to a new deep-water loading terminal at Point Central on the peninsula, and the company built the planned settlement of Cansado for its staff. The second was fish. The waters off Mauritania, fed by the cold Canary Current, are among the richest in the world, and a fleet of local pirogues and foreign trawlers grew around the port, with freezing and processing plants on shore. At independence in 1960 the town was renamed Nouadhibou.

The bay became known for a different sight. Ships that were old, seized or simply no longer worth running were abandoned in the shallows over decades, until more than 300 lay rusting in the waters off the port, reckoned the world's largest ship graveyard. From February 2006 the town also became a departure point for migrant boats making for the Canary Islands, and it remains one. In 2012 the town was made Mauritania's first free zone, an attempt to draw investment into an economy that still rests on fish and ore.

Nouadhibou is a town of arrivals. Moorish families from the desert live alongside Halpulaar, Soninke and Wolof Mauritanians from the southern river valley, and there are long-standing communities of Senegalese, Malian, Guinean and other West African workers who crew the boats and work in the processing plants. Hassaniya Arabic is the common language, with Wolof and Pulaar heard in the port and French in business.

Life is organised around work at sea and the hospitality that follows it. Three rounds of sweet green tea, brewed over coals and poured from a height, mark any pause in the day, in offices, workshops and on mats beside the boats. Dress is the Mauritanian norm — the pale daraa for men, the wrapped malahfa for women — and Friday prayer sets the shape of the week.

The town's identity is industrial and outward-looking rather than scholarly: there are no old libraries or caravan-town monuments here, and people measure the year by the fishing season, the price of octopus and the movement of the ore trains. It is also a place marked by departure — for work in Europe, for the Canary Islands by boat, or simply for Nouakchott — and by the arrival of others coming to find work in the port.

About 173,000 people live in Nouadhibou, making it the second city of Mauritania, though it is a fraction of the size of the capital and feels like a large town spread thinly along a windy spit of desert. Most households depend directly or indirectly on fish: the artisanal fleet of wooden pirogues, the industrial trawlers, the ice plants, the freezing and packing works, and the lorries that run the catch south to Nouakchott or out through the port.

Iron ore is the other pillar. Trains of well over a hundred wagons arrive from Zouérat at the Point Central terminal, where bulk carriers load for Europe and Asia, and the national mining company remains one of the town's biggest employers, while processing the ore is the town's largest single industry. The free zone created in 2012 offers tax advantages meant to bring new businesses to the town.

Daily rhythms follow the wind and the boats: early starts, a quiet middle of the day, and the streets busy again in the evening. Water and electricity supply, the cost of living and the state of the coastal road are constant local concerns, as are overfishing and the foreign fleets that work the same grounds. Cansado, with its ordered streets, remains the most comfortable place to live; much of the rest of the town is low-built, sandy and functional.

Fish dominates, and it is fresher and cheaper here than anywhere else in the country. Grilled or fried sole, grouper, sea bream, mullet and sardines are everyday meals, and octopus — the most valuable part of the catch, most of it exported — is also eaten locally. The standard lunch is thieboudienne, rice cooked in a tomato sauce with a whole fish and vegetables, a dish shared with Senegal and prepared here with whatever the boats have landed.

The Moorish side of the kitchen brings meat and milk: goat and mutton stews with rice, camel meat, millet couscous, and méchoui, a whole lamb roasted for weddings and for Eid al-Adha. Zrig, soured milk thinned with water and sweetened, is drunk through the day, and dates from the Adrar oases are sold in the market.

Because the port draws people from across West Africa, Senegalese kitchens serve mafé, a groundnut stew, and yassa, onions and lemon with chicken or fish, while the town's small restaurants run to Moroccan tagines, Lebanese grills and French-style bread and pastries. Alcohol is illegal, so the evening drink is tea, juice or a soft drink, and a meal ends with the three glasses poured in turn.