Museums & Galleries in Chinguetti

Why here

Chinguetti holds one of the most remarkable things you can see in the Sahara: living libraries of medieval manuscripts, kept by the same families for centuries. In its heyday the town was a centre of Islamic scholarship on the pilgrimage road, nicknamed the Sorbonne of the Sahara, and its families amassed thousands of hand-copied books on Koranic law, astronomy, mathematics, medicine and poetry. Several of those private libraries survive in the old ksar, plain rooms where a librarian carefully opens brittle, illuminated volumes on a low table in front of you, some of them close to a thousand years old. To read about the trans-Saharan trade is one thing, to stand in a mud-walled house while a descendant of the copyists turns the pages is another. The collections are under real threat from heat, insects and the encroaching sand, which gives a visit an added weight. Walk the sand-drowned lanes and the old mosque with its square minaret, then sit with the books. There is nothing else quite like it.