Mauritania’s capital was designed for 15,000—and then the desert moved in
Nouakchott, Mauritania’s capital and largest city, sprawls in the southwest Sahara as administrative and economic hub. Chosen as capital with building from 1958 for about 15,000 people, it ballooned when 1970s drought refugees arrived; by 2023 nearly 1.5 million lived there.
Nouakchott, in southwestern Mauritania, is the country's capital, largest city and economic hub, and one of the biggest cities in the Sahara. Until 1958 it was a small fishing town that had been a fortified fishing village, or ksar, before and during French rule. Its original inhabitants, the Bouhoubainy, a tribe of Amazigh origin, were later resettled elsewhere, notably at Aknodert near the airport.
As independence approached, Mauritania had no capital at all; the colony had been run from Saint-Louis in Senegal. The first president, Moktar Ould Daddah, and his advisers wanted a city that would stand for modernity and national unity, which ruled out existing interior towns, and they chose this spot for its central position between Saint-Louis and Nouadhibou. Building began in March 1958 to house 15,000 people, and the basics were ready when France granted independence on 28 November 1960. Planners laid out a grid of broad streets and assumed little commerce would happen there, yet the new Fifth District soon grew a huge open-air market. By the 1970s the new quarters, home to ministries and state firms, had eclipsed the old ksar.
Then came the drought. From the early 1970s hundreds of thousands of people fled failing villages and spreading desert for the capital, many crowding into poorly served slums. The 1977 census found 134,000 inhabitants and the 1988 count 393,325, both probably undercounts, and estimates for the mid-1980s ran to 400,000 to 500,000. The 2013 census found 958,399, and by 2023 the population was nearly 1.5 million, at least a third of Mauritania's 3.3 million people. Polisario Front guerrillas attacked the city twice in 1976 during the Western Sahara conflict but did little damage.
The city now has a deepwater port, Nouakchott-Oumtounsy International Airport, one of Mauritania's two international airports, and the University of Nouakchott along with several specialised colleges.
Source: Nouakchott
