The peripheral situation of Mauritania in the cartography of imperial interests, as well as in the cartography of the circuits and interests of colonial tourism, was the main guiding force for this paper that will focus on how Mauritania was touristically promoted within the colonies of French West Africa. Therein we will explore the country’s "peripheral status" through the analysis of both tourist guides and brochures, and of the discourses framing the display of those territories in the colonial exhibitions held in the first half of the XX century, discourses that contributed to perpetuate the marginal status of the country in the context and within the framework of colonial narratives connected to leisure. The tourist promotion of colonial Mauritania was based, at first, upon two different types of discourse: 1) one built upon an interpretation of Mauritania as mainly a “buffer” territory with no “touristic attractions”, a huge and dissuasive space filled with sand set between the northern and southern French African colonies; and 2) one built upon the promotion of touristic attractions that were, in fact imported from other places and regions, with different characteristics and physiognomies, such as the hunting potential of “exotic” species. Afterwards, Mauritania would be touristically promoted taking into account other resources and features, which gave place to forms of ethnographic tourism. The desert however would only appear as a central touristic product a few decades after the country’s independence. We will see that, despite the fact that the territory had been discursively constituted as touristic periphery during the colonial period, it is clear, through an analysis of archival material, that Mauritania was established as a kind of tourist niche whose success was growing over the 1950’s, despite its diminished status as an official colonial tourist destination within the French colonial empire.