The Ubari Lakes hold rain that fell tens of thousands of years ago, when the Sahara was still green. Around twenty pools lie in the troughs of the Idehan Ubari, a sand sea covering some 58,000 square kilometres of Libya's Fezzan, and none of them is fed by a river or a cloud. The dune valleys simply dip below the water table of the Murzuq basin, and fossil groundwater soaked up in ancient wet periods seeps in. Nothing flows out. Under a sun that takes back everything it can, the salt has concentrated until the water runs about five times saltier than the sea, and the only animal that survives in it is a red brine shrimp the size of a rice grain. Date palms and reed grass crowd each shoreline in a green seam a few metres wide, pressed between blue water and orange sand.
Reaching them means a 4x4 crossing of the dunes — Gaberoun lies some 36 kilometres off the Sabha-Ubari road — and the arrival is abrupt: sand, more sand, then water below you. Wade in and you cannot sink; the brine carries you, stings every cut, and dries on your skin as a white crust you rinse off at a well. On Gaberoun's shore stand the mud walls of the Dawada village, empty since the 1980s. But the lakes are going. The same aquifer is now pumped hard for irrigation, the water table is dropping, and Lake Mandara, one of the classic three, is today a bed of cracked salt and mud. In December 2025 the Global Environment Facility approved a five-year, 5.8 million dollar UNDP programme to rehabilitate the wetlands and prepare a national park. For now you come only with a licensed Fezzan guide and permits, and most governments still advise against travel to Libya.