Saudi Grand Mosque

The Saudi Grand Mosque — officially the Nouakchott Grand Mosque — is the most prominent building in the capital's low skyline, its white minaret visible from much of the central city. Built with Saudi funding in the 1980s, it can hold several thousand worshippers and is the focal point of the city's religious life.

Non-Muslim visitors are not admitted to the interior during prayer times, but the exterior is worth seeing, and the surrounding streets fill dramatically at Friday prayers. The architecture is functional Saudi-sponsored modernism rather than traditional Mauritanian style, but it is the nearest thing Nouakchott has to a landmark monument.

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The Saudi Grand Mosque was funded entirely by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia — part of a broader programme of mosque construction across the Sahel that accompanied the spread of Wahhabi Islamic practice in the 1980s and 1990s. Mauritania, a deeply conservative Islamic society, received several such gifts, and the mosques have become landmarks in cities that had little notable architecture of their own.