 Tourism in Mauritania

Following Mauritania’s independence from France in 1960, at which time the vast majority of the country was still nomadic, European tourism developed slowly.In part this was attributable to the Western Sahara War in which Mauritania was briefly engaged, but the driving distance from Europe was also a factor when compared to Algeria whose profile similarly benefitted from the rise of the original Paris-Dakar rally in the early 1980s.