Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL
Capital: N’Djamena
Population: 21 million+
Language: Arabic, French, more than 120 languages are spoken.
1 – Lake Yoa (also above)
Lake Yoa, the largest lake at Ounianga Kebir, belongs to the Lakes of Ounianga, 18 interconnected lakes in the Sahara of north-eastern Chad, which form the largest known lake complex in a hyper-arid environment and in 2012 became Chad’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site.
See the deep, hypersaline waters of Lake Yoa, then the freshwater lakes of Ounianga Serir, where floating reed mats cover much of the surface and help slow evaporation.
Lake Yoa survives where some 6 m of water evaporates each year because fossil groundwater from the Nubian aquifer keeps topping it up, and the layered mud on its bed holds an unbroken record of about 6,000 years, showing that the green Sahara turned to desert gradually rather than suddenly.
2 – Ennedi Massif
The Ennedi Massif, a sandstone plateau in Chad’s far north-east roughly the size of Switzerland, has been carved by erosion into canyons, towers and arches, and in 2016 was inscribed by UNESCO as a mixed natural and cultural landscape, one of only a few dozen such sites.
Aloba Arch rises about 120 m, among the tallest natural arches in the world, thousands of rock paintings and engravings cover Ennedi’s walls, and at Guelta d’Archei herders bring hundreds of camels down a canyon to drink at a year-round pool.
The pool at Guelta d’Archei also shelters a tiny relict group of West African crocodiles, perhaps only a handful of animals, survivors from a wetter Sahara and among the last of their kind in the desert.
3 – Lake Chad
Lake Chad, a vast, shallow lake in the Sahel where Chad meets Cameroon, Niger and Nigeria, gave the country its name, from a local word, tsade, meaning a large expanse of water, and supports around 30 million people across its basin.
Its shifting maze of reed-fringed channels, marshes and islands is home to the Buduma, who fish, build boats from papyrus reeds and herd Kuri cattle, whose huge, hollow horns help them float as they swim between the islands.
About 7,000 years ago “Mega-Chad” covered around 350,000 km², rivalling the Caspian Sea, the world’s largest lake, but drought and heavy use of its water have shrunk Lake Chad by about 90% since the 1960s.
4 – Zakouma National Park
Zakouma National Park, in Salamat region in south-eastern Chad, is the country’s oldest national park, created in 1963, and covers about 3,000 km² of wooded savanna and floodplain that floods in the rains and shrinks to a few pans in the dry season.
The dry season is the time to visit, when huge herds of buffalo gather, around half of the world’s Kordofan giraffe browse the woodland, lion, roan and tiang come to the pans, and flocks of quelea tens of thousands strong join black crowned cranes and storks.
Poachers cut Zakouma’s elephants from more than 4,000 in 2002 to about 450 by 2010, and in 2012 five rangers were killed in an ambush at Heban, but since African Parks took over management in 2010 poaching has been largely stopped and the herd has begun to grow again.
5 – Tibesti Mountains
The Tibesti Mountains, a volcanic massif in the deep Sahara of northern Chad that spills over into southern Libya, are home to the Teda, a branch of the Toubou people, and to Emi Koussi, at 3,415 m the highest point in the Sahara.
The landscape is one of black lava fields, sandstone canyons and giant calderas, among them the Trou au Natron, some 6–8 km wide and the best part of a kilometre deep, its floor crusted white with natron salts.
Hundreds of engravings and paintings across the Tibesti show elephants, giraffes and later herds of cattle from when the Sahara was green, and in the Second World War Leclerc’s Free French used the oasis of Zouar, on the Tibesti’s flank, as a forward base for raids into Italian-held Libya.