La Güera marks the southernmost point of Western Sahara, where the Cap Blanc peninsula runs out into the Atlantic. It lies about fifteen kilometers west of the Mauritanian city of Nouadhibou, separated by an old border that splits the narrow peninsula down its length. The name itself comes from the Spanish word agüera, a ditch that channels rainwater to crops, an oddly hopeful name for a place where rain almost never falls. The setting is stark: low desert, shifting dunes, and the cold Atlantic breaking against a shore that fades into haze.

The town came into being in late 1920, when the Spanish colonial officer Francisco Bens negotiated with local tribal leaders and established a fort and an air base on the western side of the peninsula. It rose just a few kilometers from the French settlement of Port-Étienne, today's Nouadhibou, on the eastern side. The two colonial powers had agreed in 1900 to split the peninsula straight down the middle, and La Güera became Spain's foothold at its tip. For four years, from 1920 to 1924, it was governed as a separate part of the colony and issued its own stamps before being folded into the Spanish colony of Río de Oro. An airport served the town until the 1970s.

Before war emptied it, La Güera was known for the extraordinary richness of its waters. The monk seal was the symbol of the town. Dolphins worked these shallows alongside the fishermen in a rare partnership, the Imraguen people driving fish toward the shore while the dolphins drove them back, each helping the other to a catch. Those fishermen belonged to the most tradition-bound part of the Sahrawi population, keeping the Amazigh language and fishing techniques shared with Canary Island fishermen across the water. When the Canary-Saharan fishing bank still ran at full capacity, this was a living, working coast. Those days are now only memory.

Everything changed in 1975 and 1976. As Spain withdrew from the Sahara, the long Western Sahara War swept across the region, and La Güera changed hands more than once. When Mauritania withdrew from that war in 1979, the town's population was estimated at 816. The fighting, the disputed status of the territory, and the sheer remoteness drained the place of life. By 2002 it stood abandoned and partly buried in sand, home only to a very few Imraguen fishermen and watched by a Mauritanian military outpost, though the ground beneath it is not formally Mauritanian. A ghost town at the edge of a contested map, La Güera keeps its name and little else, the desert slowly taking back what people briefly built.