Western Sahara

The desert was home to nomadic Sahrawi tribes of Arab-Berber descent, herding camels and controlling caravan routes, with the caravan town of Smara as a religious centre. Spain claimed the coast in 1884 and consolidated the colony of Spanish Sahara in the twentieth century, developing phosphate mining at Bou Craa from the 1960s.

As Spain prepared to withdraw in 1975, the International Court of Justice found no tie of sovereignty that would override the Sahrawis' right to self-determination. Morocco responded with the "Green March", sending some 350,000 civilians across the border to press its claim, and Spain handed administration to Morocco and Mauritania. The Polisario Front, backed by Algeria, declared the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) and fought both. Mauritania gave up its share in 1979; Morocco took it and built a 2,700-kilometre defensive sand wall, the berm, sealing off roughly the western four-fifths of the territory — the useful part, with the coast, the towns, and the phosphates.

A United Nations-brokered ceasefire in 1991 was meant to lead to a referendum on independence or integration; it has never been held, snagged on who is eligible to vote. The SADR is a member of the African Union and is recognised by dozens of states, while Morocco's claim has drawn growing recognition, including from the United States in 2020 and France in 2024. Around 170,000 Sahrawi refugees have lived for decades in camps near Tindouf in southwestern Algeria. In November 2020 the Polisario declared the ceasefire over, and a low-intensity conflict along the berm has continued since.

Sahrawi culture is closely related to that of Mauritania: Hassaniya-speaking, Muslim, and rooted in camel-herding nomadism, with the same customs of desert hospitality and the ritual of three rounds of sweet, foamy green tea poured from a height. Sung and recited Hassaniya poetry is a prized art, and the melhfa, the brightly coloured cloth women wrap around themselves, is the distinctive dress.

Decades of displacement have shaped a strong national identity among Sahrawis, in the camps and the diaspora, expressed in protest art, poetry, and the flag. In the Moroccan-controlled towns, daily life increasingly resembles that of southern Morocco, with a large settler population drawn by tax breaks and public jobs, and the two societies — long-standing Sahrawi families and Moroccan settlers — living side by side under a heavy security presence.

Fewer than 600,000 people live in the whole territory. The Moroccan-controlled area is centred on Laâyoune, a purpose-grown administrative city, and the fishing and tourism port of Dakhla; the economy runs on Moroccan public spending, the Bou Craa phosphate mine and its conveyor belt to the coast, one of the world's richest fishing grounds, and, more recently, tomatoes and melons grown under plastic and a push into wind and solar power.

Life in the Polisario-run zone east of the berm is thin and pastoral, and life in the Tindouf camps depends almost entirely on international food aid, with a generation born and raised in exile. Water, in a place with almost no rainfall, is the constant constraint everywhere.

The food is Sahrawi and southern Moroccan: whole roast camel or goat (méchoui) for celebrations, camel meat and milk among herders, couscous with meat and vegetables, and plentiful grilled and fried Atlantic fish on the coast at Dakhla and Laâyoune. Bread, dates, and the long green-tea ceremony accompany almost every gathering, and a guest is not let go without being fed.

Realistic visiting means the Moroccan-controlled Atlantic coast. Dakhla, on a thin peninsula enclosing a large shallow lagoon, has become a kitesurfing and windsurfing centre, with desert camps, flamingos, oyster farms, the white dune of its lagoon, and 4x4 trips to features such as the "Imlili" pools and the Porto Rico beach. Laâyoune has Spanish colonial architecture, the cathedral, and the market, and is the gateway to the Bou Craa conveyor — at around 100 kilometres, the longest in the world — visible from the road.

The wider desert holds the caravan town of Smara with its ruined nineteenth-century fortress-mosque, long empty beaches and rich birdlife along the coast, and, at Lagouira in the far south near the Mauritanian border, the meeting of desert and ocean. Areas near the berm, the buffer strip, and the Polisario-held east are mined and off-limits, and the ruins of the war are not a tourist landscape.