Banc d'Arguin National Park

The Banc d'Arguin stretches along Mauritania's Atlantic coast south of Nouadhibou, and to appreciate it you need to understand the tide. Twice a day the sea retreats up to 5 km, turning the shallow continental shelf into a vast expanse of tidal mudflats that shimmer in the heat haze and reflect the sky like dark mirrors. The tidal range here exceeds 2 metres on spring tides, and the rate at which the water retreats is genuinely startling — you can watch it happening from the shore over the course of an hour, the sea drawing a clean line across the mud and then continuing to retreat beyond it.

The park covers both marine and terrestrial zones: open water, tidal flats, sandy beaches, mudflats, salt marshes and a fringe of desert inland. This remarkable diversity of habitats within a single protected area is what makes the Banc d'Arguin globally significant — you can move from open ocean to coastal lagoon to tidal flat to desert acacia woodland within a few kilometres. This range of habitats supports an extraordinary concentration of biodiversity, and the park is recognised as one of the most important coastal wetlands in the world.

The birds are the main spectacle: greater flamingos feed in dense pink sheets across the shallows, spoonbills work the channels in disciplined rows, and pelicans dive with surprising weight for a bird so large. Herons, storks, ibises and flamingos share the shallows, and on the higher sandy islands you can find colonies of terns and gulls undisturbed by land predators. The total count of individual birds recorded at the park during the northern winter exceeds two million, a figure that places it among the top three or four wetland sites globally for migratory waders.

Inland from the tidal zone, the park extends to the edge of the Sahara and includes one of the most important stands of Acacia erioloba woodland in the region. These trees, known locally as camel-thorn, grow to 15 metres and form an open savannah beneath which dorcas gazelle, jackals and smaller mammals move. The ancient shell mounds along the beach — some up to 5 metres high and extending hundreds of metres — are testimony to centuries of human gathering of shellfish by the Imraguen people who have fished these waters for generations.

The park can be explored from the sea in a traditional pirogue; you approach the bird colonies quietly and watch flamingos take off in sheets of pink against the blue Atlantic. The silence of the tidal flats, broken only by the calls of waders and the rush of water, is one of the most complete natural experiences in West Africa. To sit on the mud at low tide and watch the scale of the park reveal itself as the water retreats is to understand why this place is irreplaceable — and why its protection matters to the entire East Atlantic flyway.

One of the most important wetland sites for migratory birds in the world, with up to two million individuals counted.

The only major coastal park on the West African Atlantic seaboard that combines marine, tidal and desert habitats.

Traditional fishing by local Imraguen people has been practiced here for centuries and is part of the park's cultural landscape.