Mauritania document photos online

Reach for change in Mauritania and the math turns medieval: the ouguiya is one of only two currencies left on Earth that doesn't divide by ten. It splits into five khoums — the word literally means "a fifth" — a fossil of pre-decimal accounting that survives in modern wallets. When the central bank rebooted the money in 2018, swapping ten old ouguiya for one new note, it quietly dropped the khoum coin yet kept the non-decimal name. For a country whose passport, banknotes and very statehood were all forged in the 20th-century Sahara, that stubborn fraction is a fitting national signature.

• Currency The Mauritanian ouguiya is one of only two circulating currencies in the world not based on a power of ten, dividing instead into five khoums — a word meaning "one fifth."
• Redenomination In 2018 Mauritania reissued its entire money supply, replacing every ten old ouguiya (MRO) with one new ouguiya (MRU) to wipe out years of accumulated zeros.
• Currency name "Ouguiya" descends from the Arabic uqiyyah, meaning a Roman ounce — so Mauritanians literally spend ounces, a unit of weight rebranded as a unit of cash.
• Passport power The Mauritanian passport ranks 77th on the Henley Passport Index, opening roughly 55 destinations visa-free or visa-on-arrival to its holders.
• Statehood The Islamic Republic of Mauritania was declared on 28 November 1960, and its constitution requires that both the citizens and the president be Muslim.
• Identity & rights Mauritania was the last country on Earth to abolish slavery, doing so in 1981, and only made it a criminal offence in 2007 — a stark backdrop to questions of legal identity and citizenship.
• Manuscripts The desert town of Chinguetti, sometimes called Islam's seventh holy city, still guards medieval manuscript libraries — a UNESCO-listed archive of identity documents and scholarship without peer in West Africa.
• Capital Nouakchott had barely 5,800 residents when it became the capital around 1960; drought-driven migration has since swollen it past 1.4 million, making it one of the largest cities in the Sahara.
• Geography Mauritania hosts the Richat Structure, the 50-km "Eye of the Sahara" so vast and circular that astronauts use it as a landmark from orbit.