A legendary city of scholars at the Sahara's edge
Timbuktu grew rich from the 14th century as a meeting point of trans-Saharan caravans and Niger River traders, and it became a renowned centre of Islamic scholarship. Its three great mud-brick mosques, Djinguereber, Sankore and Sidi Yahia, form a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the city's families and libraries preserved many thousands of manuscripts on astronomy, law, medicine and poetry. The Ahmed Baba Institute was founded to study and conserve them. For centuries the name has stood in European imagination for the most remote place on earth.