Sijilmasa, the gate of the gold road

Much of the gold coined in medieval Europe and North Africa came north through this one town. Sijilmasa sat where the Sahara crossing begins, and for six hundred years the West African gold that made Mali the richest kingdom on Earth crossed here, traded weight for weight against salt. Then it emptied and the desert took it. Excavation at Rissani has been recovering the mosque and the mint since the 1990s, so the town people had written off as legend is being dug back out of the sand.