A dust-blown town of half-built houses perched at the end of a peninsula of eerie rock formations on the Moroccan border, Nouadhibou boasts little to hint at the vast wealth trawled up since the European Union began negotiating fishing deals with Mauritania in 1987.

Dunes tumbling into the Atlantic provide a spectacular backdrop, but the wrecked hulks of more than 100 ships give the bay the feel of a nautical graveyard.