Updated November 2026

See also:
Atlantic Highway
The Dig Tree
Trans-Sahara Routes
Tindouf piste

The N1 Atlantic Highway down the coast to Mauritania is straightforward and safe and essentially a continuation of Morocco but with more frequent checkpoints. More here.

Many current maps, not least Google Maps, (but only when viewed outside of Morocco) identify a territory called ‘Western Sahara’. The dashed border along its northern edge gives a hint that there is no actual country called ‘Western Sahara‘.
The M4 map above based on my Morocco Overland 4 guidebook shows how this area breaks down in real life.

In late 2020, just before the US election, the Trump administration was the first western country to recognise Moroccan sovereignty over this entire territory. Since 2021 the State Department map depicted ‘Greater Morocco’ (left). So briefly did the BBC, until they changed it back quick. In 2022 Spain, the region’s former colonial power, followed the US’s steps, so did France in summer 2024. In October 2025 the UN acceded to Morocco’s 2007 ‘Autonomy Plan‘ and a year later the UN Security Council failed to renew MINURSO‘s mandate. Based in Layounne and with a handful of bases either side of the Berm, after 35 years the peacekeeping mission shut down.

Many maps like the US DoS are misleading as they fail to identify the 2000-km long Berm (shown on my M4 map above; more below) which is the de facto border between Moroccan territory to the west and the Polisario Free Zone of the SADR to the east.

What does this all mean to the desert traveller?
You can easily travel down the all-sealed N1 Atlantic Route in Morocco’s territory to Mauritania with no problems bar a few checkpoints and where a fiche (right; click to download template) is handy. Fuel is discounted south of Tan-Tan and fuel stations are frequent enough in the desert between the main towns of Laayoune and Dakhla. However, despite what some current maps may suggest, the heavily militarised Berm is not here to stay. Get too close ~30km – and the army will send you back, and off piste in the deep south you may even hit a landmine. Stick to the west side.

Origins

The former colony of Spanish Sahara, (left) was relinquished by Spain in favour of Morocco and Mauritania in 1975. This was against the wishes of the indigenous Saharawi (‘Saharans’) population and their Polisario Front which had been agitating for independence since the 1960s. A few months later the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) was declared by the Polisario.

Michael Mercer’s 1975 book, Spanish Sahara describes the region’s geography and history, and Skeletons on the Zahara is another good read set in the area. John Lodwick’s pompous and convoluted The Forbidden Coast (1956), less so.

By 1979 Morocco had annexed the resource-rich west of the territory to which it had long made claims. As a result of that, a war broke out with Algeria (allied with Mauritania for a while) who both claimed to support the Saharawi and the SADR.

In 1991 the UN brokered a ceasefire with plans for a referendum to decide the future of the territory and the MINURSO mission was established. But by this time Morocco had populated its part of the territory with northern Moroccans so as to win any referendum which has been repeatedly postponed until the MINURSO mission ended in 2026. Laayoune today has a population of some 200,000, most of them northerners benefitting from ‘frontier territory’ subsidies and other inducements.

In the meantime Morocco began building a series of defensive berms, spreading in successive waves further south (above; fanack; good info there), until by 1987 the current 1500-km long militarised wall or Berm divided the territory longitudinally, like a modern Great Wall of China.
The Atlantic side – two-thirds of the territory – are known in Morocco as the Southern Provinces. East of the Berm as far as the Mauritanian border is the Polisario Free Zone (PFZ), barely developed, far less occupied and supported by Algeria which also hosts many Saharawi refugee camps over the border around nearby Tindouf. If Morocco’s autonomy plan succeeds in unifying the Western Sahara (ie: incorporating the PFZ), unravelling all this defensive infrastructure will be a whole lot of work.

From sat maps you can see the Berm cuts a corner off northwest Mauritania across what old maps call the Zemmour Blanc (left), so dividing the PFZ into two regions. Not all maps displayed on this page show this delineation correctly, a former Moroccan forward line which is currently unmanned. In 2018, a Slovenian traveller inched over the vertical border line and wrote this.
This break in territories forced the Saharawi of the PFZ to cut across Mauritanian territory in the vicinity of Bir Mogrein when they wanted to get from the Saharawi camps near Tindouf (Alg) to the less populated southern sector of the PFZ. In 2025 this break in the PFZ territories enabled the completion of a road from Smara south to the Mauritania border, but it’s unlikely to go further. More about that here.
One can speculate that Mauritania tolerates these transits as long as the non-Mauritanian Saharawi (ethnically Moors anyway) stay in the north. Further south one hears the latitudinal ‘railway border’ between the PFZ and Mauritania is respected by the army and police of both sides, although it’s said Saharawi nomads seasonally pass over the border and back.

Inland travel from the coast is much less common. A couple of roads and pistes lead to mines, small Saharawi settlements and Moroccan military bases embedded along the land mined and patrolled Berm. Zoom in with Google sat and you can see these installations clearly.
We travelled in this area in 2019 (below; well away from the Berm) and there’s even a French guidebook listing routes (above right). But the rather dull landscape and risk of landmines when away from well-used pistes (particularly in the south) puts people off. See this, summarised in the box, left.

The Dakar Rally (below) used to run from Smara or Guelta Zemmour in Morocco, (briefly across the PFZ) and into northern Mauritania. But since at least 2002 tourists cannot cross the Berm – and when they could they did so with least difficulty along the main piste linking Guelta Zemmour with Bir Mogrein. The Dakar Rally returned to Morocco for 2027, but the publicised route stayed on Morocco’s side of the Berm.

Years ago a couple of travellers traversed the PFZ’s southeast corner which is used by locals as a shortcut between Nouadhibou and Zouerat to avoid the Azzefal dunes (left). But as a foreigner, once noticed or arriving at Zug, you may be escorted via a couple of (now former) UN-bases northeast to Arounit, close to the Mauritanian border and south of Zouerat.
In the PFZ you may find Spanish more commonly spoken than French, and it’s said you can get by with no visa or invitation letter, use Mauritanian ouguiya and buy cheap Algerian fuel. But lately it seems tolerance towards what few tourists venture into the southern PFZ (for example the ‘Pelican 16′ Shackleton wreck west of Zouerat) has dropped off. Unless you have good connections they don’t want you there.