Río de Oro

Common card · No. 387058

Río de Oro (Spanish: [ˈri.o ðe ˈoɾo] , Spanish 'River of Gold'; Arabic: وادي الذهب, Wādī-aḏ-Ḏāhab 'River of Gold', often transliterated as Oued Edhahab) is the southern part of Western Sahara. With Saguia el-Hamra, it constituted the Spanish province of Spanish Sahara after 1958; it had been taken as a Spanish colonial possession in the late 19th century. Its name comes from a misinterpretation of Dakhla Bay as the mouth of a river. The Spanish name is derived from its previous name Rio do Ouro, given to it by its Portuguese discoverer Afonso Gonçalves Baldaia in 1436. The Portuguese prince Henry the Navigator dispatched a mission in 1435, under Gil Eanes and Baldaia, to find the legendary River of Gold in western Africa. Going down the coast, they rounded the al-Dakhla peninsula in present-day Western Sahara and emerged into an inlet, which they excitedly believed to be the mouth of the River of Gold (see Senegal River). The name continued to be used for the inlet and the surrounding area...

Read on Wikipedia · Image previous version User:Ignaciogavira ; current version HansenBCN, designs from SanchoPanzaXXI, CC BY-SA 3.0