Nouadhibou

Nouadhibou
Climate diagram
	Temperature in ° C , precipitation in mm
	Source: wetterkontor.de

Nouadhibou
نواذيبو

Main Street Blvd. Médian

State :

Mauritania

Region :

Dakhlet Nouadhibou

Department:

Nouadhibou

Founded :

1906

Coordinates :

20 ° 57 ′ N , 17 ° 2 ′ W Coordinates: 20 ° 57 ′ N , 17 ° 2 ′ W

Height :

12 meters above sea level

Residents :

118,167 (2013 census)

Time zone :

GMT ( UTC ± 0 )

Nouadhibou

Nouadhibou ( Arabic نواذيبو, DMG Nawāḏībū ), formerly Port-Étienne , is the second largest city, the largest port and the economic center of Mauritania , as well as the capital of the administrative region Dakhlet Nouadhibou . The location on a peninsula on the West African Atlantic coast was ideal for the construction of an industrial port in the early 1960s, through which the iron ore transported by rail from the mining area around Zouérate has been shipped since then . Another industry is fishing . The Nouadhibou ship cemetery is the symptom of a misguided state economic policy.

location

Nouadhibou is located near the border between Mauritania and Western Sahara on the protected east side in the middle of the Ras Nouadhibou headland, which is a few kilometers wide . This protrudes about 40 kilometers to the south into the sea and borders the bay of the same name, Dakhlet Nouadhibou , which was formerly called Baie du Lévrier . The bay, which is very shallow in its upper area, could once have been a salt basin (sebkha) with a brackish water lake, of which there are some in Western Sahara and the geological origin of which has not been clearly established. The border with Western Sahara follows a colonial-era partition plan and runs lengthways through the peninsula to its southern tip, with Mauritania receiving the eastern part and the narrow, unpopulated desert strip on the west coast belonging to the Western Sahara.

The urban area extends for about 15 kilometers along the coast from its northern end to the southern district of Cansado. The iron ore loading port of Port Minéralier, where the Zouérat railway line ends, begins another three kilometers to the south . A little north of Cansado, a five-kilometer road branches off to the west coast to the ruins of La Gouira , a former Spanish trading center. Yellowish-white limestone cliffs fall steeply down to the sandy beach on the west coast. The southern tip of the peninsula has been declared a national park; in addition to Mauritanian soldiers and a lighthouse, some of the rare Mediterranean monk seals can be found there.

At the beginning of 2005, the 470-kilometer asphalt road south to the state capital Nouakchott was completed. Until then, the drive there was time-consuming and only possible with four-wheel drive vehicles along the coast. The west African coastal road between Morocco and Senegal is now paved throughout and the last section of the Cairo-Dakar highway is closed. To the north it is 60 kilometers on this connection to the border (near the settlement of Guerguarat) and another 400 kilometers through almost uninhabited stone and sand desert to the first Western Saharan city of Ad-Dakhla . There is no road inland.

Several bus companies offer daily trips to Nouakchott from their respective offices. There is no public transport to Ad-Dakhla. Atar in the central Adrar region can only be reached by taking the iron ore railway in the direction of Zouérat to Choum station .

Nouadhibou has an international airport ( IATA code NDB). There are regular flights to Nouakchott and irregular flights to Gran Canaria Airport .

history

End of the 19th century Spanish, French and British trading companies began settlements on uninhabited western sahara African coastline to apply to the nomadic living Sahrawis and Bidhan to do business. According to the treaties that a Spanish delegation concluded with the Emir of Adrar, the Spanish ambassador was able to declare the area between La Gouira and Cape Bojador in the north a protectorate in 1884 . At that time, the Spaniards had founded the three settlements La Gouira, Villa Cisneros (today's Ad-Dakhla) and Villa Bens (today's Tarfaya on the Moroccan southern border). It was only after 1900 that the French, who had already taken control of Senegal by the middle of the 19th century, began to penetrate into Mauritania. This was initially done peacefully, from 1905 increasingly militarily. Port-Étienne was founded in 1906 as a fishing port in economic competition with La Gouira and named by Ernest Roume, 1902–1907 Governor General of French West Africa , in honor of Colonial Minister Eugène Étienne (1844–1921). In addition to Port-Étienne, Fort Gouraud (today F'dérik ) and Fort Trinquet (today Bir Moghrein) were other French foundations directly on the border with neighboring Spanish territory.

In 1908, the French army captured the city of Atar in a fight against allies of Sheikh Mā al-ʿAinin, the most important leader of the anti-colonial liberation struggle. The revered man's capital was Smara in the north of the Spanish Western Sahara. When in 1913 a French troop took the city, which had been abandoned by its residents, and bombed the mosque and library there, the Sahrawis saw this as an act of vandalism. The resistance of individual tribes, organized by the descendants of Mā al-ʿAinin, took the form of robbery ( ghazzis ) in the following years and was concentrated in northeastern Mauritania. On March 26, 1924, one of the Port Étienne raids was on.

Port Artisanal fishing port

Up until the 19th century, Sahrawis only made modest fishing without boats in shallow water, but they had long been in contact with fishermen from the Canary Islands , from whom they traded fish and allowed them to maintain their boats on land and to grant the nets mend. That is why Sahrawis were willingly employed at the Spanish branches and, after the establishment of Port Étienne, there as fishermen and in fish processing. Fishing in Port Étienne was industrialized in 1921 with the establishment of the Soc. Industrialists de la Grande Pêche .

If fewer caravans with merchandise than expected arrived at Villa Cisneros, their number continued to decline due to the new French trading post. Around 1920 the three Spanish coastal settlements were still quite small, for example a doctor counted 20 houses and 28 tents in Villa Cisneros in 1926, and the Spaniards had not penetrated inland either. In contrast, the French had established a number of military and administrative stations within Mauritania, and Port Étienne was already clearly superior to La Gouira in terms of size and economic output. In 1925, the French Co. Générale Aéropostale set up airfields in Cape Juby (on the southern border of Morocco), Villa Cisneros and Port-Étienne as bases on the post flight route Toulouse - Dakar (literarily processed by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in wind, sand and stars ) .

The local fishermen ( Imraguen ) never owned ocean -going ships, mainly due to a lack of suitable timber . To enable them to buy their own fishing boats, the French founded the Soc. Indigène de Prévoyance de la Baie du Lévrier, which loaned money that could be returned within two years in the form of the captured earnings. Canarian fishermen took over the training. In 1970, a few dozen houses gathered around the fish factory of La Gouira, in which 500 to 750 inhabitants lived, while the population of Nouadhibou was given as 11,000.

Mauritania became independent in 1960, while Western Sahara remained Spanish. An agreement of February 1964 allowed Spanish fishing trawlers to fish in Mauritanian waters, in return the Spaniards invested in a joint fish processing company, Société des Industries Mauritaniennes de Pêche (IMAPEC) in Nouadhibou, which was completed in 1972. The facility was designed to process 9,000 tonnes of canned, dried, salted or frozen fish annually, including 2,000 tonnes caught by Canarian fishermen.

LPG system. This is where the entire city's gas bottles are filled, which households use for cooking

South of the small fishing port from the French colonial era, a new port facility was built in the early 1970s with international aid, which was further expanded in 1983 with a loan from the World Bank of 8 million US dollars. Another aid program made it possible in 1987 to expand the port for goods loading with a turnover of 500,000 tons per year. Further technical improvements were only inadequately implemented, for example the construction of an oil pipeline to the only oil refinery in Mauritania to the north adjacent to the Port Minéralier, the Société Mauritanienne d'Industrie de Raffinage, owned and operated by the Algerian Nafta . The processing capacity was 20,000 barrels of imported crude oil per day and was supposed to supply the Mauritanian fishing fleet with fuel. However, production has ceased in 2000. In June 2002 construction began on a new quay for the fishing port at a projected cost of $ 1.4 million. A new cold store and warehouse are to raise the port to the technical standards of the Canary Islands.

During the Western Sahara conflict from 1976 onwards, the situation in the city was tense, as the Polisario Front was expected to be attacked. To protect the city, the then President Moktar Ould Daddah allowed Moroccan troops to be stationed nearby. Until Mauritania withdrew from Western Sahara and thus from the conflict in 1979, the city had not been attacked. After the peace agreement between Mauritania and the Polisario in Algiers in June 1979, the new military ruler Mohamed Khouna Ould Haidalla feared a Moroccan attack. Therefore, the Moroccan troops around Nouadibhou were replaced by French paratroopers .

The history of the iron ore loading port goes back to the establishment of the multinational consortium Mines de Fer de Mauritanie (MINERFA) in 1952, which was supposed to initiate the mining of the iron ore deposits at Fort Gouraud ( F'dérik ). Around 1960, the Port Minéralier loading port was built in Nouadhibou . In 1963, dismantling and removal by rail from the F'dérik / Zouérate region began. Ore mining accounted for 85 percent of the country's total export income in the 1960s. The freight trains run with up to 220 wagons each with 84 tons of iron ore, which is reloaded in the port onto ships with a maximum load capacity of 150,000 dwt . In 1974 the consortium was nationalized under the name Société Nationale Industrielle et Minière (SNIM). In the 1990s, SNIM had the processing facilities at the port expanded, and in 2005 the construction of a second quay for ships up to 180,000 dwt began. The processing capacity is 12 million tons per year.

On December 4, 2019, there was a shipwreck near the city with at least 62 dead .

Cityscape

City expansion in the north of Numerowat

At the time of independence, the population of all Mauritanian cities was in the four-digit range, in 1963 the number for Nouadhibou was around 6,500. According to the 1988 census, the city had 59,198 inhabitants, the 2000 census showed 72,337 inhabitants. A calculation for 2010 resulted in a population of 83,995. The 2013 census showed a population of 118,167, making it the second largest city in Mauritania. Many residents are immigrants from Senegal , Guinea or other West African countries.

Nouadhibou is divided into three separate parts of the city on a north-south axis, limited to the east by the lagoon and to the west by the railway line that runs through the desert. Numerowat, the largest and most populous district in terms of area, extends along the trunk road in the north. It was built in the early 1980s in a largely right-angled street system and is subdivided into six residential areas, the French called robinets after the respective public water taps that supply the population with drinking water at intervals of a few 100 meters. Around this time a water pipe was laid from the groundwater resources at Boulenoir (Boû Lanouâr), a village 90 kilometers inland on the railway line, to Nouadhibou. There is no demarcated villa area in the city, but there are some well-kept townhouses in a more extensive part of Numerowat, on the eastern edge of which on the flat sand strip on the shore of the lagoon and in the north the most recent unplanned settlement expansion with cheap accommodation is taking place. Between the southern lower commercial street of this district and the lagoon, the airport runway, which is surrounded by a four-kilometer wall, divides a wide, swampy sand plain.

Slum in the west of the center

In the center, at the northern end of the semicircular Cansado Bay, lies the business district (simply Ville , "city"), on whose main street, Boulevard Médian, banks, exchange offices, police and shops are located. To the east of it, some new, large administrative buildings tower up in a spacious district. On the eastern (lower) main street there are a few middle-class hotels for business people, as well as restaurants with European cuisine, whose customers are mostly expats , including seamen from the international fishing fleets who have licenses for the Mauritanian waters. Chinese restaurants mainly serve their own compatriots, some have a dubious reputation. The crews of container ships have increased prostitution and drug use since 2000. The parallel street west of the boulevard leads through the lively market district with small grocery stores, clothes dealers, handicrafts (silverware) and simple Senegalese restaurants.

The streets branching off from the Boulevard Médian to the east lead through the older district of Tcherka and end after a kilometer at the fish market and the sheltered bay of the old fishing port of Port Artisanal. The boats for coastal fishing come almost exclusively from Senegal, the crew also come from there or from neighboring countries in the Sudan region . On the east side of the harbor basin, behind a fishmeal processing factory, there is a long stretch of coast where the shipwrecks belonging to the Nouadhibou ship cemetery have been rusting on the sandy shore since the 1980s. Most of the still buoyant ships are anchored in the middle of Cansado Bay. In the coastal area south of the fishing port, over a length of one kilometer, there are smaller industrial companies and a technical school for fisheries management ( Ecole Nationale d'Enseignement Maritime et des Pêches, ENEMP). The main road to the south leads directly to the modern fishing port of Port de Péche Moderne and the container port of Port Autonome .

The entire western edge of Numerowatt, bordering the sandy desert and the railroad track, is an average of 200 meters wide slum area made up of makeshift huts. From the year 2000, Nouadhibou developed into a place of transit for African refugees who want to embark on the perilous voyage to the Canary Islands in overcrowded and mostly unsuitable boats. The Mauritanian government, in cooperation with the EU, built special camps to accommodate the refugees before they are sent back to their home countries. Some still settle here permanently. After the security systems in the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla were strengthened in 2005, more refugees are using alternative routes such as via Nouadhibou. In February 2007, for example, a Spanish rescue ship brought a trawler in distress with 369 refugees from several African and Asian countries on the way to the Canary Islands to the port of Nouadhibou. 299 of them were housed under unacceptable conditions in a fish warehouse, where they were guarded by Spanish soldiers for several months before they were returned.

Cansado terraced housing estate

Eight kilometers south of the city center is Cansado (Spanish for “tired”), a district that the French created in 1960 for the workers of the SNIM company; their workplace in Port Minéralier is another three kilometers south. Like the entire city, Cansado has a predominantly black African population. The settlement is located at the southern end of the bay of the same name. Standardized row houses were built around a central square, of which the higher-quality ones have a parking space and a front garden on the street side and a walled small garden on the rear side. Halfway between the city center and Cansado is an inconspicuous stone building that marks the railway stop for passengers.

Climate table

Average monthly temperatures and rainfall for Nouadhibou

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
Max. Temperature ( ° C )	24.3	25.4	27.0	26.2	26.5	27.9	27.2	28.2	30.5	29.9	27.3	24.7	O	27.1
Min. Temperature (° C)	13.6	14.2	14.8	15.1	16.1	17.4	18.8	19.9	20.3	19.0	16.8	14.5	O	16.7

Precipitation ( mm )	2	3	2	0	0	0	1	3	5	3	2	1	Σ	22nd

Hours of sunshine ( h / d )	8.0	8.4	9.0	9.5	10.0	9.2	8.4	8.8	8.2	8.2	8.1	7.9	O	8.6

Water temperature (° C)	19th	18th	19th	19th	19th	20th	21st	24	24	23	22nd	20th	O	20.7

Humidity ( % )	63	68	69	72	73	74	79	78	73	72	69	66	O	71.4

Source: wetterkontor.de

literature

Tony Hodges: Western Sahara. The Roots of a Desert War. Lawrence Hill Company, Westport, Connecticut 1983
John Mercer: Spanish Sahara. George Allen & Unwin Ltd, London 1976
Anthony G. Pazzanita: Historical Dictionary of Mauritania. 2nd ed. The Scarecrow Press, Lanham (Maryland) / Toronto / Plymouth 2008