Mauritania · MR

Koumbi Saleh

Koumbi Saleh is the ruined medieval city in south-eastern Mauritania long held to be the capital of the Ghana Empire, the great Sahelian state that grew rich controlling the trans-Saharan gold trade. What survives is not a monument of soaring walls but an archaeological landscape: a hilltop town of stone houses, a vast early mosque, sprawling cemeteries and the enigmatic Columns Tomb, scattered across a remote stretch of Sahel near the Malian border. Today the old town sits beside a small Soninke commune, and the site rewards the historically curious far more than the casual sightseer. Its excavated ruins speak of a densely built Muslim trading city of the 11th to 14th centuries, while the finds from its soil — epigraphic stone slabs, a rare coat of mail, imported glass and coins struck as far away as Baghdad — now live mainly in the National Museum in Nouakchott. It is a demanding, far-flung destination, but for anyone fascinated by the medieval empires of West Africa it is among the most evocative places on the map.