Río de Oro

Río de Oro is the southern part of Western Sahara, on the Atlantic coast between about 21 and 26 degrees north. Its name, River of Gold, came from a Portuguese expedition of 1435 that mistook the inlet of Dakhla Bay for the mouth of a legendary river. Spain took possession of the coast in the late nineteenth century, and the settlement of Villa Cisneros, today's Dakhla, became the seat of a small colonial administration. The territory was administered together with Saguia el-Hamra to the north, and after 1958 the two formed the Spanish province of Spanish Sahara. Río de Oro was sparsely inhabited by Sahrawi nomads and was crossed by caravan routes linking the coast to the interior. In 1914 a German auxiliary cruiser was attacked off the colony by a British warship in one of the first naval actions of the First World War. When Spain withdrew in 1975, the Madrid Accords divided Western Sahara between Morocco and Mauritania, and the boundary cut through Río de Oro. Mauritania abandoned its share in 1979, and the area remains disputed between Morocco and the Polisario Front.