Libya
A vast desert nation on the Mediterranean's southern shore
Libya is a sprawling desert country on the central Mediterranean coast, the fourth-largest nation in Africa yet home to only around 7.5 million people, nearly all of them living within a short drive of the sea. The Sahara claims more than ninety percent of its territory, an emptiness broken by oases and by some of the richest oil reserves on the continent. Stitched together from three historic regions, Tripolitania in the west, Cyrenaica in the east, and the desert Fezzan in the south, Libya has struggled to hold itself together since the 2011 fall of Muammar Gaddafi plunged it into rival governments and recurring conflict.
The coastline curves around the Gulf of Sidra, where fertile plains and the Jabal al-Akhdar (Green Mountain) of Cyrenaica catch enough rain to support farming. Inland the land becomes a furnace of sand seas, stony plateaus, and dry valleys, with the highest point, Bikku Bitti, rising near the Chad border to about 2,267 meters. There are no permanent rivers, and the audacious Great Man-Made River project pipes fossil groundwater from deep desert aquifers to the coastal cities. Oil dominates the economy, giving Libya enormous potential wealth that years of instability have left only partly realized.
Ancient Cyrene and Leptis Magna made this coast a jewel of the Greek and Roman worlds, and their ruins remain among the finest in the Mediterranean. Arab armies brought Islam in the seventh century, and centuries of Ottoman rule gave way to a harsh Italian colonization in the twentieth. Libya won independence in 1951 as a kingdom, then was transformed by Gaddafi's 1969 coup into an idiosyncratic, oil-funded autocracy. The 2011 uprising ended his four-decade rule but opened a fractured era of competing administrations, militias, and foreign intervention that the country is still working to resolve.