Western Sahara's geography: named for rivers and divided by a sand berm

Why both regions carry the names of rivers

Spain fixed the internal division in 1934, the year joint Spanish and French forces subdued the interior, when it split its Saharan holdings into two regions named after rivers: Saguia el-Hamra, the "Red River", in the north, and Río de Oro, the River of Gold, in the south. Britannica gives Saguia el-Hamra the northern third and Río de Oro the southern two-thirds, between Cape Bojador and Cape Blanco. Morocco claimed both in 1957, and in 1958 Spain joined them into a single province, Spanish Sahara.

Neither name describes water that runs. The main Wikipedia article calls the Saguia el-Hamra a dry river. Río de Oro is a bay, which Britannica records the Portuguese reached in 1346 and identified, mistakenly, with a Río de Oro further south, probably the Senegal River. The bay kept the name, and it is where Spain settled first. In September 1881 the fishing company Sociedad Pesquerías Canario-Africanas built a pontoon in it after local leaders ceded the company the Dakhla peninsula, and the fort raised on its shore in 1885 was named Villa Cisneros, the former name of Al-Dakhla. The Ramsar Convention's site summary describes the Baie d'Ad-Dakhla as 37 kilometres long and separated from the Atlantic by a dune system.

The territory has no permanent stream anywhere, only flash floods in the spring months, and the river names have outlasted the colony regardless. The General Assembly's request to the International Court of Justice, answered in the advisory opinion of 16 October 1975, defined its subject as "Western Sahara (Rio de Oro and Sakiet El Hamra)". The movement that began its insurgency against Spain in May 1973 called itself the Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Río de Oro, shortened to Polisario, and Morocco keeps the northern name in one of its administrative regions, Laâyoune-Sakia El Hamra.

Where Spain and France fixed the land edges

Spain's claim began at the shore and moved inland on paper. On 10 July 1885 Spain proclaimed a protectorate over the coast from Cape Bojador to Cape Blanc, and a decree of 1887 extended its jurisdiction 150 miles inland, into an interior that geographers had not yet mapped.

The lines that hold today were settled with France. The Treaty of Paris of 27 June 1900 defined the limit between Spanish Sahara and French Mauritania, and a convention of 1904 clarified it. A final convention, of 12 November 1912, left Spain a protectorate over the strip between the Draa river and the parallel 27°40′ north, known as Spanish Southern Morocco, and confirmed Spanish sovereignty over Saguia el-Hamra to the south of it. In 1958 Spain ceded the Cape Juby strip to Morocco.

Two of the edges the treaties left are survey lines. The Wikipedia survey of the territory's geography notes that it has no northernmost point, because its northern edge is a circle of latitude, and no easternmost point, because its eastern edge there is a meridian. Its southernmost point is the tip of Ras Nouadhibou, also called Cabo Blanco or Cap Blanc. Britannica, in its entry revised on 18 September 2026, describes the land side as Morocco to the north, Algeria for a few miles in the north-east and Mauritania to the east and south, and gives the area as 252,120 square kilometres. The record beside this article carries 266,000, the figure in the Wikipedia survey revised on 16 October 2026, and the main Wikipedia article opens its revision of 15 October 2026 with 272,000.

The people of the territory crossed these lines before anyone drew them. The International Court of Justice recorded in 1975 that the migration routes of almost all the territory's nomadic tribes crossed what were to become the colonial frontiers, and that the tribes kept pastures, cultivated land and wells in both Western Sahara and present-day Mauritania, with their burial grounds in one or the other. Morocco and Mauritania argued that the territory had been artificially separated from their own by the European colonial powers; the Court acknowledged historical links with both and found them insufficient to prove the sovereignty of either. Morocco states today that it holds sovereignty over Western Sahara. The Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, proclaimed by the Polisario Front on 27 February 1976, claims sovereignty over the whole territory inside the same lines.

How the land rises from coast to hills

The Wikipedia survey describes the terrain as mostly low, flat desert, with large areas of rocky or sandy surface rising to small mountains in the south and the north-east; the main Wikipedia article has the coastal land rising, especially in the north, to small mountains of up to 600 metres on the eastern side. The survey gives the highest point as an unnamed elevation of 701 metres east of Aousserd. The record follows the survey for the highest point and gives the lowest as Sebkha Tah, 55 metres below sea level, a depression in the north-west that straddles the line with Morocco.

Britannica notices the flatness through travel: motorable tracks abound and paved roads are few. In the land-use figures the survey reproduces for 2005, arable land made up 0.02% of the territory and permanent crops none of it.

The land was wetter once. Britannica records Neolithic rock engravings in Saguia el-Hamra and at isolated sites in the south, which suggest a succession of hunting and pastoral peoples before a gradual desertification that began about 2500 BCE. The Ramsar Convention describes one salt flat in the Dakhla region, Sebkhat Imlili, as a relic of an original Saharan aquatic system and evidence of the recent tropical past of the far south. More than 160 permanent pockets of salty or hypersaline water lie in its northern part, more than ten kilometres from the Atlantic, and they hold a locally endemic fish of the cichlid family, related to the Guinean tilapia. Morocco designated its 1,774 hectares as a Ramsar site on 12 January 2018.

What the cold current does to the coast

Western Sahara has a hot desert climate throughout, BWh in the Köppen classification, and annual average rainfall is below 50 millimetres everywhere. The contrast runs between the coast and the interior. Cool currents offshore hold coastal temperatures steady through the year, and at times they produce fog and heavy dew. The vice-president of the regional tourism council, interviewed by the Moroccan economic news site Médias24 on 21 December 2023, gave Dakhla's temperature as 15°C in January and 29°C in August, the sea's as 15 to 22°C, and named July and August as the months of strong wind. Further north, the Ramsar entry for the Côte Aftissate-Boujdour, about 50 kilometres of coast below a sea cliff 70 metres high, says that coastal upwelling shapes its productivity and its climate.

Inland the sea's influence fades. The main Wikipedia article gives average highs of 43 to 45°C in July and August, and the survey records that summer highs can reach 50°C or more at Smara, Tichla, Bir Gandus, Bir Anzarane, Aghouinite and Aousserd. Winter days stay hot, with average highs of 25 to 30°C, although average lows fall to 7°C in some places and the north can, rarely, freeze at night in December and January. A hot, dry sirocco laden with dust and sand can blow in winter and spring, and the survey reports harmattan haze 60% of the time, often severely restricting visibility.

The embassy of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic to Ethiopia and the African Union writes that Spanish colonisers called the Sahrawis "Sons of the Clouds", for the distances they covered in pursuit of rain and pasture.

Where the water is and who settled beside it

The International Court of Justice called the territory's rainfall "low and spasmodic" in 1975, and found that it had left the land at the time of Spanish colonisation to nomads, pasturing their animals or growing crops as and where conditions were favourable. The tribes moved on routes set by the seasons and by the wells or water-holes available to them, and the right of pasture was generally held in common. A perennial water-hole belonged in principle to the tribe that had put it into commission, though others could use it, subject to customs on priority and on the amount of water taken.

Towns followed water as well. Britannica dates Smara to between 1898 and 1902, when Ma al-Aynayn built it at an inland oasis, five miles south of the Saguia el-Hamra by the Wikipedia account of Spanish Sahara. Spain stayed on the coast for decades, at Villa Cisneros and at Cape Juby and La Güera, which it occupied in 1916 and 1920, and its forces reached Smara only on 15 May 1934. El Aaiún, which Britannica spells Laayoune and calls the principal city and old colonial capital, was founded in 1940, after the discovery of a significant aquifer.

Drought moved people into those towns. Matthew Porges, of the University of St Andrews, writes in Forced Migration Review that catastrophic droughts during the colonial period triggered rapid, though temporary, urbanisation around Spanish-controlled cities, and the Wikipedia account of Spanish Sahara records that from 1958 Spain forced some nomadic inhabitants to settle in certain areas. Morocco's census of 1 September 2024, published by its High Commission for Planning, counted 92.4% of the people of the Laâyoune-Sakia El Hamra region and 80.4% of those of Dakhla-Oued Ed-Dahab as urban.

Outside the towns, the Wikipedia article on the economy records fruit and vegetables grown in the few oases, alongside camels, sheep and goats. Porges records that after the 1991 ceasefire the Polisario Front cleared landmines on a large scale and installed and maintained wells, so that nomadic pastoralism could return to the land it holds.

Where the berm runs and who holds each side

How Moroccan forces built the wall

Moroccan forces began the berm in 1980, by the dates in the Wikipedia account, and formally finished it on 16 April 1987; the Congressional Research Service, in its report updated on 8 October 2014, dates the start to 1981. It went up in six stages, each enclosing more ground, and the first surrounded what Wikipedia calls the "useful triangle" of El Aaiún, Smara and the phosphate mines at Bou Craa. Britannica gives the length as some 2,000 kilometres, completed by 1987.

The structure is low and continuous. Wikipedia describes walls of sand and stone about 3 metres high, with bunkers, fences and landmines, and quotes an observer in 2001 who described a wall 2 metres high, with a trench behind it, riding along the high ground throughout the territory, with bases every 5 kilometres and radars reaching 60 to 80 kilometres beyond it. The main line runs for about 2,500 kilometres. It starts at Guerguerat on the coast near the Mauritanian town of Nouadhibou, turns north beyond Tichla, passes Guelta Zemmur and Smara and follows the Algerian line into south-eastern Morocco. MINURSO and UNHCR maps show it extending several kilometres into territory internationally recognised as Mauritania's in many places. Every major settlement lies on the Moroccan-held side, and so does the mine at Bou Craa.

Each party names it differently. In Arabic it is al-jidār ar-ramliyya, the sand wall. The Polisario Front calls it the "wall of shame"; Morocco calls it a "defensive wall", a "wall of sand" or a "security wall". MINURSO, which describes itself as the only impartial observer deployed on both sides, calls it "the berm, the sand wall that continues to separate the Moroccan and Frente POLISARIO military forces". The British Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, in advice current on 16 October 2026, records militarised zones 30 kilometres wide on either side of it containing landmines.

Who lives on each side of the sand wall

The 1991 ceasefire, in the International Crisis Group's description of 11 March 2021, divided the territory along the sand berm and set up a buffer strip and a restricted zone between the two forces. Morocco administers the west as its Southern Provinces. The Polisario Front holds the east, which it calls the Liberated Territories or the Free Zone, and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic moved its provisional capital there from Bir Lehlou to Tifariti on 27 February 2008; Morocco, in the Wikipedia accounts, regards that land as a buffer zone. The road through Guerguerat, which joins Morocco to Mauritania, cuts across the buffer strip. Rabat paved it in 2016, and on 13 November 2020 Moroccan troops entered the strip to end a three-week blockade by Polisario supporters, after which the Polisario Front withdrew from the ceasefire.

How much lies on each side depends on who published the figure, and when, and the publishers agree on neither the share nor the verb.

The people are as unevenly placed. The record gives 612,000 as of 1 January 2021. Britannica gives 670,993 for 2024, the sum of the two Moroccan regions in the census of 1 September 2024: 451,028 in Laâyoune-Sakia El Hamra and 219,965 in Dakhla-Oued Ed-Dahab. The regions and the territory do not coincide, since the Wikipedia list places Tarfaya Province, named for the town at Cape Juby that Spain ceded in 1958, inside Laâyoune-Sakia El Hamra. East of the berm, the Wikipedia article on the economy describes the land as mainly uninhabited, with camel herding its main activity, and none of the sources for this article gives a dated count of the people living there.

Most Sahrawi refugees live outside the territory, in camps set up in 1975 and 1976 in Algeria's Tindouf Province, which Porges writes were deliberately built near a large aquifer. The camps are divided into wilayat named after towns in Western Sahara: El Aaiún, Aousserd, Smara, Dakhla and Boujdour. The Congressional Research Service reported on 8 October 2014 that the Algerian government estimated 165,000 refugees and the UNHCR 125,000, and that Algeria had not permitted a UNHCR census.

What the phosphate conveyor carries to the coast

The other long line built on this land is a conveyor belt. Britannica records that huge phosphate deposits were found in 1963 at Bou Craa, south-east of Laayoune, and that mining began there in 1972. Each source measures the belt that carries the phosphate to the coast differently: more than 100 kilometres in Britannica's entry of 18 September 2026, 98 kilometres in the main Wikipedia article as revised on 15 October 2026, and 102 kilometres on the OCP Group's operations page as it stood on 16 October 2026. Britannica adds that the belt was frequently damaged after 1976 during the Sahrawi guerrilla war against Morocco, and that the shortage of water makes extraction difficult.

The OCP Group's page places Boucraa "in the Southern Provinces of Morocco" and gives it about 2% of Morocco's phosphate reserves. The United States Geological Survey's yearbook for 2020 and 2021 gives the same 2% and credits Phosboucraa, the OCP subsidiary that runs the mine, with a capacity of 2.6 million tonnes of phosphate rock a year; it exported 1.0 million tonnes in 2019 against 1.9 million in 2018, a fall the Survey attributed to the conflict over sovereignty. The yearbook explains its own map: after the United States recognised Moroccan sovereignty on 10 December 2020, its chapter on Morocco includes the mineral industry of the Western Sahara region, with exploration for copper, gold, rare-earth elements and uranium in the south.

Which registers list the coast and its waters

The territory's protected sites are on its coast, and two international registers file them differently. Three of the wetlands Morocco has designated under the Ramsar Convention lie south of the parallel 27°40′ by their coordinates, and the Convention's summary lists all three under Morocco: the Baie d'Ad-Dakhla, 61,010 hectares, on 15 January 2005; Sebkhat Imlili on 12 January 2018; and the Côte Aftissate-Boujdour, 11,700 hectares, on 16 April 2019. The World Database on Protected Areas, kept by UNEP-WCMC and IUCN, records no protected area under Western Sahara in its release of October 2026, and 0% of the territory's land or sea as covered.

The Convention's entry for the Dakhla bay describes intertidal seagrass beds, algal plains and salt and sand pans. Its dwarf eelgrass, a vulnerable species, gives habitat to more than 120 species of molluscs, 41 species of fish are recorded in the bay, and the bay marks the northern edge of the range of the Atlantic humpback dolphin.

The waters off the coast carry the dispute with them. Spanish fishermen from the Canary Islands had been coming to these shores since the 18th century, and Britannica records that dried fish goes from the territory to the Canaries. The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled on 4 October 2024, in a final judgment, that the 2019 agreements between the European Union and Morocco on fisheries and on agricultural products had been concluded in breach of the principle of self-determination, because the people of Western Sahara had not consented to their application to the territory; its press release speaks of the territory and "the waters adjacent to" it. In a judgment delivered the same day, the Court held that melons and tomatoes from Western Sahara must be labelled with Western Sahara alone as their country of origin.