Roofing in Mauritania

Mauritania lies across the western Sahara and the Sahel. Its historic caravan towns, Ouadane, Chinguetti, Tichitt and Oualata, are among the most distinctive stone-built settlements of the Sahara, with flat roofs carried on palm timber. They form a World Heritage site inscribed in 1996.

Climate and hazards

Most of Mauritania is hot desert. The chief hazards for buildings are heat and moving sand: Chinguetti is seriously threatened by encroaching dunes, which mark its western edge, and several houses have been abandoned to the sand.

Roofing history

The four ksour were founded in the 11th and 12th centuries to serve caravans crossing the Sahara, and their urban fabric developed between the 12th and 16th centuries. UNESCO describes their architecture as an original and decorative stone architecture. Chinguetti is traditionally said to have been founded in 777 and was re-founded as a fortified trading centre in the 13th century. Its older quarters use reddish dry stone and mud brick, and its roofs are flat and timbered with palm wood. The Friday Mosque, a 13th-14th-century building of dry stone, has a square minaret topped by five ostrich-egg finials.

Traditional and vernacular roofs

• Flat stone-town roofs: palm-wood beams spanning dry-stone or mud-brick walls, with flat roofs above, as in Chinguetti.
• Earth construction: houses in a ksar are grouped buildings of stone and earth.

Notable roofs

• Chinguetti: stone houses with palm-wood flat roofs and the Friday Mosque; the old quarter has five important manuscript libraries.
• Ouadane, Tichitt and Oualata: the other three ksour of the World Heritage site.

Local roofing terms

• ksar (plural ksour): fortified village.

Sources and gaps

No national roofing code was found in published sources. No information on domestic roofing manufacturers was found.

Published sources are limited. Published sources do not cover nomadic tents, the decorated earth houses of Oualata in detail, Nouakchott's modern housing, or roof-material statistics.