Chinguetti is a town of a few thousand people that once lent its name to a whole country: for centuries the Arab world knew all of Mauritania as Bilad Shinqit, the land of Chinguetti. The town standing today was founded in 1264, after its people left an older settlement the sand had taken, and it grew rich where the trans-Saharan caravan routes crossed. Scholars arrived with the salt and the dates, and Chinguetti became one of West Africa's great centres of Islamic learning, its copyists filling volumes on law, astronomy, mathematics and medicine. The Friday mosque is a square tower of split stone laid without mortar, stripped of ornament in the austere Maliki manner, and it serves as Mauritania's national emblem. People here call the town the seventh holiest city of Islam and its minaret the second oldest still in use — claims cherished in Mauritania and disputed nearly everywhere else. UNESCO listed the old town, with Ouadane, Tichitt and Oualata, in 1996.
Walk the old quarter now and the dunes are at the windows. Sand spills through doorways, houses stand abandoned to it, and the lanes between the dry-stone walls rise and fall with the drifts. What survives is kept by families: a few private libraries still open their doors, and a keeper will unwrap a leather binding to show you hand-copied pages of geometry and Quranic law, the oldest of them close to a thousand years old. The population keeps shrinking as the young leave for work, and mains electricity only became reliable in 2013. Below the town the palm grove still fruits, and each July and August families camp among the trees for the guetna, the Adrar's date harvest. You get here as everyone does: by 4x4, 85 kilometres of piste east of Atar.