The Sahara desert is the largest desert in the world. It has got extreme temperatures, hyper-arid regions, scarce vegetation, and a unique fauna. The borders are less arid due to its neighbors: the Atlantic Ocean, the Atlas Mountains, the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, the Nile and the Niger River, and the Sahel. But the most amazing fact about the Sahara is that it is inhabited even in the most arid parts. All these aspects amount to present us different images of the Sahara desert.



This region has a great variety of characteristics. In its most arid portion, we can see sand dunes, stone plateaus, gravel plains, dry valley, salt flats, and mountain massifs. Because of this wide range of elements, you can have great pictures of undulating sand dunes, sand patterns, and photos of its beautiful and harsh landscape, all of them are distinct images of the Sahara desert. To well represent this wide range of elements, WWF presented a detailed classification of its ecoregions: Atlantic Coastal Desert, a narrow strip of land in Western Sahara and Mauritania which is not so arid due to the Canary current, which provides moisture; North Saharan Steppe and Woodlands, which is located in the northern edge, next to the Mediterranean forests, and whose main characteristic is the presence of winter rain; Sahara Desert, a hyper-arid area in the centre with extremely low rainfall, rare vegetation, and the common presence of sand dunes, covering parts of Egypt, Algeria, Chad, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Sudan; South Sahara Steppe and Woodlands, a narrow belt between the Sahel in the south and the hyper-arid central portion of the desert; West Saharan Montane Xeric Woodlands, which consists of several volcanic highlands and presents a cooler and moister environment in parts of Algeria, Niger, Mauritania, and Mali; Tibesti-Jebel Uweinat Montane Xeric Woodlands, which are the Tibesti and Jebel Uweinat highlands, and feature a higher and more regular incidence of rainfall, cooler temperatures, and the presence of tamarix, myrtle, acacias, oleander, and palms (these highlands are located in Chad, Libya, Egypt, and Sudan); and Sahara Halopytics, which are saline depressions seasonally flooded and displaying plants that are salt-adapted. Examples of these saline depressions are the Qattara and Siwa depressions in Egypt, Tunisian Salt Lakes in central Tunisia, Chott Melghir in Algeria, and other smaller places in Mauritania, Western Sahara, and Algeria. Each and every ecoregion characterized above contribute to unique images of the Sahara Desert.

Finally, we have to consider its fauna. It vary according to each ecoregion, but it is mainly constituted of dromedary camels, goats (these first two being the most domesticated animals), deadly scorpions, the scarab beetle, lizards, the fennec fox, sand vipers, some rare ostrich, addaxes, Saharan cheetah, several species of birds, a lot of arthropods such as ants, among others. This desert is one of the harshest places on Earth, and seeing these animals struggling to survive give us great images of the Sahara desert.