Dakhla, or ad-Dakhla (formerly Villa Cisneros), is a city in the Moroccan administred Western Sahara with about 67,468
inhabitants. It is about 550 km south of El Aaiún on the Atlantic Coast, located in a narrow peninsula. It is the capital of the Oued Ed-Dahab-Lagouira region.
Dakhla was founded as Villa Cisneros in 1502 by Spanish settlers during the expansion of their Empire. During the colonial period, the Spanish authorities made Dakhla capital of the province of Río de Oro, one of the two regions of the Spanish Sahara. They built a military fortress and a modern Catholic church, which remain points of interest for visitors to the city. A prison camp also existed here during the Spanish Civil War, at which writers such as Pedro García Cabrera were imprisoned.
During the 1960s, the Francoist dictatorship also built here one of the three paved airports in Western Sahara (IATA Code: VIL). Between 1975 and 1979, Dakhla was the province capital of the Mauritanian province of Tiris al-Gharbiyya, consisting of its annexed portion of Western Sahara. The main economic activity of the city is fishing. In the area south of Tindouf, Algeria, there is a Sahrawi refugee camp named after Dakhla.
