Page 8 - Traveling 71 eng

MAURITANIA
City of Oualata
8 -
City of Chinguetti
Ancient cities:
jewels of stone,
memory and knowledge
Chinguetti, Ouadane, Tichitt, and Oualata. Four names
that don’t appear on the usual tourist maps, but should
be marked in red on any serious journey through the
Sahara. These are cities of stone, dust, and memory.
They don’t live off the past—they breathe it. They are
made of history and silence. And getting to them is not
easy. But precisely for that reason, it matters.
The route begins before you even arrive. You have to
cross empty plains, climb plateaus eroded by centuries
of wind, lose yourself on tracks that don’t always show
up on GPS. And suddenly, in the middle of the desert,
a city appears. Small, rough, dense. It doesn’t seem
like time has passed. In Chinguetti, for example, the li-
braries hold manuscripts that have survived storms, in-
vasions, and centuries of neglect. Books that still sme-
ll of dry leather, copied by hand when Europe hadn’t
even dreamed of the printing press. The mosque, with
its stone minaret, remains one of the great symbols of
Saharan Islam.