Mauritania is enormous and mostly empty. It covers 1.03 million square kilometers, making it the 11th-largest country in the world, but about 90% of its territory is Saharan desert. Its population of roughly 4.6 million people clusters in the south and along the Atlantic coast.
The country runs on UTC+0 (Greenwich Mean Time), year-round, with no daylight saving time. This is the same offset as the UK, Ireland, Portugal, and several West African neighbors. Geographically, Mauritania spans about 15 degrees of longitude, which would suggest a range of solar times within the country, but administrative convenience and regional alignment keep everything on one clock.
The ancient cities of the Sahara
Mauritania contains some of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities. Chinguetti, Ouadane, Tichitt, and Oualata are four ancient trading cities in the Mauritanian Sahara recognized as UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
Chinguetti, founded in the 13th century, was a major staging point on trans-Saharan caravan routes and a gathering place for West African pilgrims en route to Mecca. At its height, thousands of manuscripts were held in private libraries there. The city has since been largely abandoned and is being swallowed by advancing sand dunes.
These cities operated on Islamic calendar time: prayer times governed the daily schedule; the Hijri calendar governed the year. The camel caravan that set out from Chinguetti toward Timbuktu tracked not UTC+0 but the sun’s position across an unobstructed sky, the depth of shadows indicating the time for prayer.
Slavery’s long shadow
Mauritania abolished slavery legally in 1981, the last country in the world to do so. Criminal penalties for practicing slavery were not established until 2007. Despite these formal changes, human rights organizations including Anti-Slavery International and SOS Esclaves have documented ongoing slavery practices in Mauritania into the 2010s and 2020s.
The persistence of slavery in a country that exists on the same clock as London is a reminder that clocks and calendar systems are politically neutral infrastructure: they run regardless of what social conditions exist beneath them.
The Atlantic coastline and iron ore
Mauritania’s coastline faces the cold Canary Current, which brings nutrient-rich upwelling waters from the deep Atlantic. This creates one of the world’s richest fishing grounds. Industrial fishing fleets from the EU and Asia operate in Mauritanian waters under licensing agreements; the fishing industry is a major source of government revenue.
The country also exports iron ore: the train from the Zouerate mines in the north to the port of Nouadhibou is one of the longest freight trains in the world, sometimes stretching over 2 kilometers and carrying up to 22,000 tons of ore. The 704-kilometer journey takes about 18 hours. Passengers sometimes ride atop the ore cars, an unofficial but well-established practice.
All of this, the fishing deals with EU fleets, the iron ore exports, the government negotiations with international partners, runs on UTC+0. For meetings with European counterparts, Mauritania has the convenient accident of being on exactly the same clock as much of the year (or one hour behind the UK during British Summer Time).
Nouakchott: a capital built on sand
Nouakchott didn’t exist as a significant settlement until 1957, when it was chosen as the future capital of soon-to-be-independent Mauritania. It was built from scratch on the Atlantic coast. Today, with an estimated population of over 1 million, it holds roughly a quarter of the country’s people.
The city is in an uncertain relationship with its environment. It is built on sandy coastal terrain; the water table is shallow and increasingly saline; it sits at sea level in a country experiencing both desertification from the north and potential sea level rise from the west. The city that was built in a generation faces the possibility of having to be substantially rebuilt or relocated within another.
UTC+0 is stable. The sand is less so.
