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Capital: Niamey
Population: 27.5 million+
Language: Hausa (Official), French, English & 9 other languages.
1 – Sahara (Ténéré) Desert (also above)
The Ténéré, a vast sea of sand in north-east Niger that the Tuareg call “a desert within a desert”, is crossed by the azalai, Tuareg camel caravans carrying salt from the desert oases of Fachi and Bilma.
Beneath the sands of the Ténéré lie traces of a green Sahara, from the dinosaur beds of Gadoufaoua, which have yielded Sarcosuchus, the “SuperCroc”, and Nigersaurus, to Gobero, the Sahara’s largest Stone Age graveyard, beside a vanished lake.
For generations the Tree of Ténéré, a lone acacia with no other tree for about 400 km, was a landmark for the caravans and was marked on European military maps, until in 1973 it was knocked down by a truck, reportedly driven by a drunk Libyan, and its remains went to the National Museum in Niamey.
2 – Air Mountains
The Aïr Mountains rise abruptly from the Sahara in northern Niger, a vast massif of granite and long-dead volcanoes and the heartland of the Tuareg, crowned by Mont Idoukal-n-Taghès on the Bagzane Plateau, at 2,022 m the highest point in the country.
High enough to catch seasonal rains, the Aïr hides oases such as Timia, with date palms, citrus gardens and a waterfall that flows for part of the year, and with the Ténéré it forms a UNESCO World Heritage Site, listed in 1991.
On the edge of the Aïr lie the Dabous Giraffes, two life-size giraffes carved into the rock at least 6,000 years ago, the larger about 5.4 m tall, among the largest animal rock engravings known.
3 – The Grand Mosque of Niamey
The Grand Mosque of Niamey, the largest mosque in Niger’s capital, was built with funding from Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, with work beginning in the late 1970s.
The Grand Mosque of Niamey stands on Islam Avenue, its tall minaret rising above the low, sprawling city that spreads along the River Niger.
Niamey was a modest riverside village when the French moved the capital of their colony here from Zinder in 1926, so the Grand Mosque stands in a capital that grew almost entirely in the 20th century.
4 – Agadez
Agadez, where the Aïr Mountains run out into the Sahara, grew in the 15th and 16th centuries after the sultan of Aïr made it his seat, a crossroads of the caravan trade whose streets follow the lines of old Tuareg encampments, and its historic centre became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2013.
The historic centre of Agadez is divided into 11 irregular quarters of earthen houses around the Sultan’s Palace, the seat of a sultanate whose court rules on disputes over marriage and inheritance, while Tuareg silversmiths cast the famous Agadez cross.
The minaret of the Grand Mosque of Agadez, rebuilt in 1844 on a mosque first raised around 1515, stands about 27 m tall, described by UNESCO as the tallest structure ever built in mud brick, its walls bristling with palm-wood beams.
5 – Zinder
Zinder, one of Niger’s largest cities, close to the Nigerian border, grew from the early 18th century as the seat of the Sultanate of Damagaram, founded by Kanuri nobles and made rich by caravan routes running south to Kano and east to Bornu.
The walled Birni quarter of Zinder holds the Sultan’s Palace, built around 1850 in Hausa style with geometric decoration and the home of the sultans, beside the Great Mosque among granite outcrops, with the old caravan quarter of Zengou to the north.
In 1898 the French officer Marius-Gabriel Cazemajou was killed in Zinder, the French took the sultanate in 1899, and Zinder served as the capital of French Niger until 1926, when the capital moved to Niamey, partly because of chronic water shortages.
6 – The Kouré Giraffes
The Kouré giraffes, about 60 km south-east of Niamey in the tiger bush, are West Africa’s last wild giraffes, a pale subspecies that once roamed widely across West Africa as far west as Senegal and was reduced by hunting and habitat loss to just 49 animals in 1996.
The giraffes of Kouré roam unfenced outside any national park, browsing among millet fields and villages with no natural predators, and visitors walk out to them with guides from the local guides’ association.
The recovery at Kouré has relied on farmers and herders living alongside the giraffes despite occasional crop damage, with tourism income paying for village projects and small loans, and a small herd has been moved to the Gadabedji reserve in eastern Niger, where giraffes had died out in the 1970s.