Chinguetti, an ancient city in Mauritania, houses some of the oldest texts and Quranic manuscripts in West Africa, which could soon be lost due to advanced desertification.
For centuries, poets, scholars, and theologians have flocked to Chinguetti, a trans-Saharan trading post with over a dozen libraries filled with ancient manuscripts.
But now the city is on the brink of oblivion. Quicksands have long covered the core of the historic 8th-century city and are encroaching upon the surrounding neighborhoods.
Climate change threatens the sacred city
As global climate warms and dries, sandstorms increasingly deposit meters of dunes on the streets of Chinguetti and in homes, completely burying them. Reforestation projects attempt to halt the invasive sands, but so far they have not alleviated concerns about the city’s future.
Chinguetti is one of the four sites declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Mauritania, a West African country where only 0.5% of the land is considered arable.
Mauritanians believe Chinguetti is one of the holiest cities in Islam. Its stone and mud houses, mosques, and libraries safeguard some of the oldest Quranic texts and manuscripts in West Africa, addressing topics from law to mathematics.
The danger of advanced desertification
Research suggests that sand migration plays a crucial role in advanced desertification. Deserts, including the Sahara, are expanding at an unprecedented rate, forming “seas of sand” that transform once green landscapes.
More than three-quarters of the Earth’s surface has become drier in recent decades, according to a 2024 UN report on desertification. Aridity jeopardizes the survival capacity of plants, people, and animals. It robs the necessary moisture for life, kills crops, and can unleash sandstorms and wildfires.
The UN report highlights that human-induced climate change is to blame, as it is warming the planet and leading to increasingly dry lands. Water scarcity related to aridity is causing diseases, deaths, and large-scale forced migrations worldwide.
In Chinguetti, climate change is causing many of the consequences authorities have warned about. Trees wither, wells dry up, and livelihoods vanish.
Sandstorms are not new, but they have become increasingly intrusive, leaving mountains of sand in the surrounding neighborhoods. Residents use mules and carts to remove the sand because the narrow streets of the old town are too tight for cars or excavators. When the sand piles up, some build new walls on existing structures.
Chinguetti has received an average annual rainfall of 2.5 centimeters in the last decade. As rains decrease, trees die, and more sand migrates toward the city.
With acacias submerged in sand, some herders resort to cutting down date palm trees to feed their flocks, further disturbing the ecosystem and the date palm cultivation economy. Sand also poses public health problems for the community breathing the dust.
Proposed solutions: more trees to halt desert encroachment
The solution lies in planting more trees both in neighborhoods and along the city’s perimeter. These “green belts” have been proposed on a continental scale as the “Great Green Wall” of Africa, as well as on a local scale, in cities like Chinguetti.
The Ministry of Environment and the Ministry of Agriculture of Mauritania, as well as EU-funded NGOs, have presented projects to plant trees to shield the libraries and manuscripts of the city from the desert’s advance.
Although some have been replanted, there is little evidence they have helped halt the desert’s encroachment. Tree roots may take years to grow enough to access groundwater.
One of the oldest cities in the world is being eroded by the sea
The case of Chinguetti is not unique regarding historic cities at risk of disappearing due to the consequences of climate change. Such is the situation of the ancient port city of Alexandria. In this case, it is not advanced desertification, but rather the potential disappearance of the city is linked to the rising sea levels and the intrusion of saltwater. A recent study confirmed this.
Scientists from the University of Southern California (USC) found that building collapses in Alexandria, one of the oldest cities on the planet often called the ‘Jewel of the Mediterranean’ for its beauty, have increased from rare events to alarming occurrences.
According to the scientific research, the rate of collapses has risen from about one per year to a concerning 40 per year in the last decade.
The rising sea level and the intensification of storms, driven by climate change, are crumbling in decades what took millennia of human ingenuity to build.
Header image: Giulio Aprin
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