Taoudenni

Taoudenni is unlike anywhere else in Mali. It still exists in the sun-baked heart of the Sahara Desert, serving only one purpose: salt mining. The settlement itself is built on the dried-up bed of an ancient saline lake. Workers come from all over the world to carve large slabs of salt from the earth, which are then loaded onto some of the world's last remaining camel caravans and trekked south to Mopti and other trading cities.

There are also the ruins of an old and infamous prison here, which was built in the 1960s by former ruler Moussa Traoré.

In 1988, the prison was closed.

Édouard Cortier, a member of the French camel corps (méharistes), visited Taoudenni in 1906 and published the first description of the mines. The Taoudenni mines are situated on the bottom of a long-dead salt lake. Miners use crude axes to dig pits that are typically 5 m by 5 m in size and 4 m deep. The miners begin by removing 1.5 m of red clay overburden, followed by several layers of poor quality salt, before arriving at three layers of high-quality salt. The salt is cut into slabs measuring 110 cm x 45 cm x 5 cm in thickness and weighing approximately 30 kg. Two of the high-quality layers are thick enough to be split in half, yielding five slabs from the three layers. After removing the salt from the pit's base, the miners excavate horizontally to create galleries from which more slabs can be obtained.

• Location: Desert Region, Mali