Chinguetti is a Saharan caravan town on the Adrar plateau of central Mauritania, founded in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century by Sanhaja Berber populations and developed across the medieval period as a stop on the trans-Saharan trade route between Sijilmasa and the Niger bend. The Berber-language toponym Šinqiṭ has given its name to a wider region of Mauritania and, in classical Arabic geographical literature, to the country as a whole — bilad shinqit.
The town's principal claim is its medieval scholarly tradition. Chinguetti was a centre of Maliki jurisprudence and Sufi learning whose libraries — preserved in private family hands across more than thirty generations — contain manuscripts in Arabic and Berber on theology, law, astronomy, and grammar dating from the twelfth century onwards. Several of the libraries remain in continuous family stewardship today.
The medieval economy combined long-distance trade with date and millet agriculture in the surrounding palm groves of the Wadi Saguia el Hamra and with the seasonal salt-and-livestock circuits of the western Sahara. The classical caravan to Walata, Timbuktu, and the Niger bend used Chinguetti as a principal staging point through the late nineteenth century.
Chinguetti was inscribed by UNESCO as part of the Ancient ksour of Ouadane, Chinguetti, Tichitt and Oualata serial World Heritage Site in 1996. The town is a continuing pilgrimage destination for west African Muslims and the seventh in the canonical list of Islamic pilgrim cities, after Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, Cairo, Kairouan, and Damascus.