La Güera

La Gouira (also Lagouira, Gouera La La La Agüera or Gouera ) was located on the Atlantic in the far south of Western Sahara city. The place is now largely abandoned and covered by sand drifts. It is located south of the Moroccan border wall and thus outside the Moroccan-controlled parts of Western Sahara.

The town's name comes from the Hassaniya name Gara (Pl. GUR) for out of the flat desert occasionally outstanding mesas whose diminutive gwēra is.

Location

The place is located in the south on the west coast of reaching into the Atlantic Peninsula Ras Nouadhibou. In the middle of the peninsula extends in the longitudinal direction since 1912, according to a former agreement of the former colonial powers of Spain and France, the boundary between the Western Sahara and Mauritania. The Mauritanian city of Nouadhibou is on the east side of the peninsula.

Traffic

La Gouira is reached by a 5 km long dirt road that branches off to the south of the center of Nouadhibou ( Keran ) when Cansado suburb to the west. In the Spanish time, there was a 130 km long asphalt road to Bir Gandouz, which is now covered by sand dunes and surrounded by minefields.

History

The city was founded in 1920 under the name Agüera, which is different from Spanish agüero " sign; Omen", derives. Under the leadership of Colonel Ben a Spanish air base has been created, just a few miles west of the French port Etienne, now Nouadhibou.

1924 La Gouira part of the province of Rio de Oro. With the withdrawal of Spain from the former colony of Spanish Sahara Mauritania occupied, according to an agreement signed with Morocco on 20 December 1975, the city. The subsequent struggle of the Saharawi liberation movement Polisario Front in 1979, however, led to the withdrawal of Mauritania from the Western Sahara, and thus also from La Gouira. Subsequently, most of the inhabitants left the place and the acquisition came to a standstill, so that in 1989 the Moroccan King Hassan II had evacuated the place.

In the 1990s, the Moroccan government decided to revive the place. Considerable funds were procured for the construction of roads and other infrastructure until it was realized that the constant threat of shifting sand makes development impossible.

Today La Gouira is a silted ruins, inhabited by few local Imraguen who live by fishing. The place is de facto in no man's land between the Moroccan occupied part of Western Sahara and Mauritania.

As the Moroccan military Ras Nouadhibou peninsula is not occupied, currently a Mauritanian military outpost, the vacuum fills in La Gouira, while the Moroccan Navy, the control of coastal waters reserves.