Northern Africa

Northern Africa is the band of the continent that looks north across the Mediterranean rather than south into the tropics, and the UN draws it to include Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, and the disputed territory of Western Sahara. What binds these seven is less a shared landscape than a shared inheritance: Arabic and Amazigh languages, an overwhelmingly Muslim population, and a desert so vast it functions as a wall. Roughly 274 million people live here, but nearly all of them cling to a thin frame of coastline, oasis, and river valley. The interior, the Sahara itself, is very nearly empty.

The Sahara covers most of the region and defines everything about it — where crops grow, where cities sit, where borders were drawn as straight lines through sand because no one contested them. To the northwest the Atlas Mountains catch Atlantic rain and lift Morocco into snow, peaking at Toubkal at 4,167 meters. To the east the Nile threads a green ribbon through Egypt and Sudan, carrying the water that supports more than a hundred million people along its banks. Between them lie the Libyan and Nubian deserts, ergs of dune and hammada of bare rock. The Mediterranean coast, cooler and wetter, holds the olive groves, the ports, and most of the history.

Sudan is where the UN's line begins to feel arbitrary. It is Arabic-speaking and Muslim in the north, but its south and west look and sound like the Sahel, and geographers who use the phrase Sub-Saharan Africa often place Sudan on the other side of it. Egypt sits in Africa but is counted in the Arab world and, by most people who live there, in the Middle East too. The old label for the western half of the region is the Maghreb, the place where the sun sets, and it still carries more meaning than the cardinal-direction category the UN prefers. The economies run on oil and gas in Algeria and Libya, phosphates and tourism in Morocco and Tunisia, and the Nile everywhere else.

• Algeria
  Africa's largest country, where the Sahara meets the Mediterranean country in region
• Egypt
  The gift of the Nile and a bridge between Africa and Asia country in region
• Libya
  A vast desert nation on the Mediterranean's southern shore country in region
• Morocco
  Where the Atlas Mountains meet the Atlantic and the Sahara country in region
• Sudan
  Land of the two Niles, where Arab and African Africa meet country in region
• Atlas Mountains
  The 2,500-km barrier between the Sahara and the Mediterranean defining feature
• Nile
  The world's longest river, lifeblood of ancient Egypt defining feature
• Sahara
  The world's largest hot desert, an ocean of sand and stone across North Africa defining feature
• Africa
  The world's second-largest continent and humanity's birthplace located in