Waw an Namus

DesertsFezzan,Libya

A volcano deep in the Libyan Sahara, its four-kilometre crater holding three coloured salt lakes and its black ash spread across 300 square kilometres.

September·Quiet month

May–Sep

This is the furnace: air highs sit near 40°C and the black ash radiates more heat back at you, so no operator sends convoys out. The cone, the reed-fringed lakes and the palms stand as ever — with no shade or water for 400 km.

Year-round The black ash desert, the central cone and the three spring-fed lakes are here every month of the year.

Waw an Namus is a volcano deep in the Libyan Sahara, in the Fezzan 400 kilometres from the nearest town, whose crater four kilometres across holds three small salt lakes of different colours around a cinder cone, and whose black ash lies over 300 square kilometres of desert, so that after hours of pale sand the ground turns black and the tyres go quiet, and it is reached by expedition and camped in, when the country allows it. Nobody can say when the volcano last erupted, since no one recorded it and the ash is undated, and the caldera holds a cone of loose scoria in its middle with a pit eighty metres deep sunk into its own summit, a small volcano built inside the wreckage of a much larger one, climbed for the view over the lakes; three lakes lie curled around the foot of the cone and no two match, one blue, one green and one a rust-red pool half hidden in a thick collar of reed grass against the inner wall, the sharpest colour in the crater on ground as black as this. The lakes lose around 1.5 million cubic metres of water a year to the Saharan sun and are still full, fed by an aquifer beneath the crater that the geologists have not fully explained. The name means the oasis of mosquitoes, for the insects that breed in the reeds, and the crater is a wetland in the driest desert on Earth, where waterbirds from Europe winter on a third of a square kilometre of water, northern shoveler, teal, gadwall, coot and little grebe recorded in the reed beds, palms and tamarisks standing at the shore. The drive in from Sebha takes two days across the sand with a guide, and the crater is camped in under a sky with no light for hundreds of kilometres, the black ash cold at night. Waw an Namus is a volcano with an oasis in its mouth, and the birds of the north have found it.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Libya is operator-only — no independent travel. A licensed agency sponsors your e-visa, obtains the southern permit and arranges the police escort that rides with you; itineraries are fixed in advance.
Come between late November and early March — the black ash soaks up the sun and summer inside the crater is genuinely dangerous. Winter nights out here get cold, so pack for them.
Camp on the rim, not down by the water — the mosquitoes that named this place rarely meet fresh blood and do not hold back. At the lakes, nets and repellent are not optional.
Climb the cone early — it is loose scoria, and you slide back half a step with every step. Once the sun is high the black ground turns into a furnace.
Carry everything you need — it is roughly 400 kilometres of open desert from Sabha, with no fuel, no water and no shade on the way. Convoys travel with spare fuel and tyres.

Things to do

1
Walk between lakes that do not match
Three small salt lakes lie curled around the foot of the cone, and no two are the same colour: one blue, one green, one a rust-red pool half hidden in the reeds. You can walk from one to the next in minutes, through date palms, on ground that is damp underfoot in the middle of the Sahara.
2
Cross the line where the desert turns black
For hours before the crater the ground is pale sand, and then it changes: basaltic ash lies over roughly 300 square kilometres, flat black grit that muffles the tyres. Nothing on that plain hints at what is coming, and the first green water shows only when you reach the rim.
3
Find the rust-red pool in the reeds
Tucked against the inner wall, a shallow pool glows orange-red inside a thick collar of reed grass — the sharpest colour in the crater, and the strangest, sitting on ground as black as this. The water is warm and ankle-deep at the edges, and the ring of grass around it stays green all year — the only green for hundreds of kilometres in any direction.
4
Climb the cinder cone at the caldera's heart
A cone of loose scoria stands in the middle of the crater with a pit 80 metres deep sunk into its own summit — a small volcano built inside the wreckage of a much larger one. The climb is steep and slips underfoot. The top is the single place where all three lakes line up around the base at once, each a different colour, with black ash running out past them to the horizon.