Ouadane

A caravan town in the Mauritanian Adrar, 93 km northeast of Chinguetti, that existed to move salt. Slabs were cut at the mines at Idjil and came through here on their way south, and Ouadane was the staging post; the first written mention of it anywhere is in Portuguese accounts from the middle of the fifteenth century. The old town is ruined but substantially still standing, in two parts, an upper quarter called Tegherbeyat that is probably the oldest and a lower one holding a fifteenth-century mosque with its horseshoe arches and patches of the original clay plaster still on the walls. UNESCO listed it in 1996 with Chinguetti, Tichitt and Oualata as the Ancient Ksour. 3,833 people at the 2023 census. It is also the nearest town to the Richat Structure.