Largest hot desert

What to remember

From the Red Sea in the east to the Atlantic in the west, and from the Mediterranean to the Sahel in the south, the Sahara covers 9,200,000 km² of North Africa. It is the largest hot desert in the world.

Counting all deserts, it is only the third largest, behind those of Antarctica and the Arctic. It covers much of North Africa, except the fertile Mediterranean coast, the Atlas Mountains of the Maghreb and the Nile Valley. It is a subtropical desert, spread across Algeria, Chad, Egypt, Eritrea, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Sudan, Tunisia and Western Sahara.

Its Arabic name means "the great desert", and it stretches 5,000 km from west to east. The Sahara has known other faces: it switches between desert and grassland on a 20,000-year cycle.