From the vast desert stretches of the North, for ages crossed by cameleer nomads (the Moors), to the lands of the southern Sahel, with their plains and the Senegal River valley, that are the world of Black African shepherds and farmers, Mauritania is an extremely unusual, motley country. To the east, the absolute desert of the immense frontier confines, where man is absent, gives way to large sombre rocky plateaus, the historic centre of the country, broken by long steep ridges and dunes that come to rest, in the west, in an Atlantic Ocean whose mighty waves break along a 700-kilometres coastline: the waters of this ocean, among the richest of the Earth, explain both the passage of great flocks of migratory birds and the importance of the fishing activities.
Belonging both to the Sahara and the Sahel, historically continental and increasingly coastal, Mauritania, by the juxtaposition of its various societies, represents a dual culture: Arab world, African world. It offers a great diversity of landscapes and populations as well as a rare, often unsuspected wealth of historical and multicultural points of interest, on the interface of two apparently remote worlds, yet whose complementary nature for centuries fostered intense exchanges between black Africa and the Maghreb, to which the Mauritanian architectural heritage and many features of its social organisation bear witness.
Belonging both to the Sahara and the Sahel, historically continental and increasingly coastal, Mauritania, by the juxtaposition of its various societies, represents a dual culture: Arab world, African world. It offers a great diversity of landscapes and populations as well as a rare, often unsuspected wealth of historical and multicultural points of interest, on the interface of two apparently remote worlds, yet whose complementary nature for centuries fostered intense exchanges between black Africa and the Maghreb, to which the Mauritanian architectural heritage and many features of its social organisation bear witness.
