A caravan town founded in AD 777, re-founded in the thirteenth century as a fortified stop for trans-Saharan caravans, and once the gathering place where pilgrims of the Maghreb met to cross to Mecca; it is sometimes called the seventh holiest city in Islam. It taught rhetoric, law, astronomy, mathematics and medicine, and five family libraries in the old quarter still hold the manuscripts, scientific and Qur’anic, some of them a thousand years old and kept in private houses. The Friday Mosque, thirteenth or fourteenth century, has ostrich egg finials on its minaret and is the national symbol. The desert is taking it: high dunes stand along the western edge and houses have been given up to the sand. UNESCO listed it in 1996. Adrar Region.
Adrar, Mauritania
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