Libya is in Africa. It lies in North Africa, in the Maghreb, on the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea between Tunisia and Algeria to the west and Egypt to the east, with Niger, Chad and Sudan along its southern edge. Covering 1,759,540 km² (679,362 sq mi), it is the fourth-largest country in Africa and the 16th-largest in the world, and most of that area is Sahara: about 90% of Libyans live on the coast, on less than a tenth of the land. Every one of its land neighbours is African, so there is no transcontinental question here of the kind that hangs over Egypt or Turkey. The complications are cultural rather than physical: Libya faces Europe across the sea and belongs to the Arab world by language, yet it also hosted the summit that decided to create the African Union.
Africa’s fourth-largest country, facing Europe across the Libyan Sea
Libya stretches between latitudes 19° and 34°N and longitudes 9° and 26°E. On land it borders six countries: Tunisia to the northwest, Algeria to the west, Niger to the southwest, Chad to the south, Sudan to the southeast and Egypt to the east. Its sea frontier is shared with three European states, Greece, Italy and Malta, which is the closest Libya comes to touching another continent. The stretch of the Mediterranean north of its eastern coast was called the Libyan Sea by the ancient Greeks, a name still used for the waters south of Crete.
At 1,770 km (1,100 mi), Libya’s coastline is the longest of any African country on the Mediterranean. Its shape is set by the Gulf of Sidra, also called the Gulf of Sirte, a deep bight that measures 439 km across its mouth, from Ras Kasr Hamet in the west to Ras Teyonas in the east, and takes its names from the oil port of Sidra and the city of Sirte on its western shore. The gulf separates the two inhabited coastal regions, Tripolitania to the west and Cyrenaica to the east.
Only three African countries are larger. Algeria became the continent’s biggest when Sudan divided in 2011, followed by the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan itself. Libya comes next, ahead of Chad and Niger, its two southern neighbours.
How the Sahara shapes Libya, from the Acacus to the Tibesti
South of the narrow coastal belt, Libya is desert almost all the way to its borders. The eastern half lies in the Libyan Desert, the region filling the northeastern Sahara, which spills over into Egypt’s Western Desert and the far northwest of Sudan, covers roughly 1,300,000 km² in all and includes some of the Sahara’s most arid and least populated regions. Rain there can fail for years at a time; even in the highlands a shower may come only once every five to ten years. At Uweinat, in the far southeastern corner, the last recorded rainfall as of 2006 was in September 1998. The heat is equally severe. For ninety years the town of ’Aziziya, southwest of Tripoli, held the world record for air temperature, 58 °C on 13 September 1922, until the World Meteorological Organization ruled the reading invalid in 2012.
The desert is not a single flat sea of sand. In the southwest, the Acacus Mountains (Tadrart Akakus) rise east of the oasis town of Ghat and run about 100 km north from the Algerian border. Tadrart is the feminine form of the Berber word for mountain. The range’s rock shelters hold paintings and carvings dated from about 12,000 BCE to 100 CE, a record of the cultural and natural changes the Sahara went through as it dried, and UNESCO inscribed the area as a World Heritage Site in 1985.
Libya’s highest point is far to the south-east of the Acacus, on the edge of the Tibesti Mountains. Bikku Bitti, also called Bette Peak, reaches 2,266–2,267 m (about 7,435 ft) on a spur of the range near the Chadian border. It is so remote that the first known ascent was made only in December 2005, by Ginge Fullen, after two failed attempts. Most of the Tibesti lies in Chad, where Emi Koussi, at 3,415 m, is the highest point of the whole Sahara.
Between these massifs, life depends on oases. Kufra, with its neighbours Tazerbo and Rebianae, forms a group of oases in shallow depressions in the southeast. In the northwest, Ghadames sits near the point where Libya, Algeria and Tunisia meet, about 462 km southwest of Tripoli. Its walled old town, once divided into districts among seven clans, is built in layers, with storerooms below, family rooms overhanging covered alleys and open-air terraces on top; the design shelters residents from the heat, and the town was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986.
Where Libyans live: Tripolitania and Cyrenaica
Libya is traditionally divided into three historical regions: Tripolitania in the northwest, Cyrenaica in the east and the Fezzan in the southwest. The first two hold almost everyone. Population density in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica is about 50 people per km², while across the rest of the country it falls below one. Libya has roughly seven million people, about 88% of them in towns and cities, and the three largest are all on the coast: Tripoli, the capital, with over a million residents, then Benghazi and Misrata.
The coast is green only in patches. The most striking is the Jebel Akhdar, the “Green Mountain” of Cyrenaica, a forested plateau rising to about 900 m that fronts the sea for roughly 330 km from Benghazi to just east of Derna. Greek colonists settled here in antiquity, and the ruins of Cyrene, on a ridge of the Jebel Akhdar near modern Shahhat, have been a UNESCO site since 1982. In Tripolitania, the Nafusa Mountains behind Tripoli are home to Berber communities, as is the coastal town of Zuwarah.
The people reflect Libya’s place in North Africa. Arabs make up about 92% of the population and Berbers about 5%, though other estimates put the Berber share near 10%. In the southern Fezzan, around Sebha, Ghat and Murzuk, live two further Saharan peoples, the Tuareg and the Toubou, whose communities also live in the neighbouring Saharan countries.
The Great Man-Made River: fossil water from the Nubian Sandstone
A country this dry should not be able to supply seven million people with fresh water, and Libya’s answer lies underground. In 1953, crews searching for oil in the south struck large quantities of drinkable water instead. It came from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System, a fossil aquifer that accumulated during the last ice age, spans four countries of northeastern Africa and is not being replenished today.
The Great Man-Made River Project was conceived in the late 1960s, and construction began in 1984. Phase one was inaugurated on 28 August 1991, and phase two, the “First water to Tripoli”, on 1 September 1996. According to the project’s own figures, it is the largest underground network of pipes and aqueducts in the world: 2,820 km of pipeline fed by more than 1,300 wells, most of them over 500 m deep, delivering about 6.5 million m³ of water a day to Tripoli, Benghazi, Sirte and other coastal towns. Water travels up to 1,600 km from the desert to the coast, and the system provides about 70% of all the fresh water used in Libya. The total cost was projected at more than US$25 billion, and Libya built it without loans from world banks.
How long the water will last is uncertain. One estimate holds that at 2007 extraction rates the aquifer could last a thousand years; others suggest it could be exhausted within 60 to 100 years. The network has also suffered from years of conflict: by July 2019, 101 of the 479 wells on the western system had been dismantled.
Why “Libya” once meant most of Africa
The question of which continent Libya belongs to has an odd twist, because the name itself was once used for Africa. It first appears in an inscription of Ramesses II, written rbw in hieroglyphs, referring to the Libu, a Berber people living around Cyrenaica and Marmarica. A coalition of the Libu and the Sea Peoples, led by the Libu chief Meryey, fought the pharaoh Merneptah in 1208 BCE and was defeated.
The Greeks turned the name into Libyē (Λιβύη) and stretched it over everything west of the Nile. For Greek and Roman geographers, Libya was one of the three continents of the known world, alongside Asia and Europa, and the Nile was the line between Libya and Asia. In that scheme, modern Libya was merely the eastern part of “Libya”. As the name of a country, it was brought back into use in 1903 by the Italian geographer Federico Minutilli. Italy then seized the territory in the Italo-Turkish War of 1911, united Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and the Fezzan as the colony of Italian Libya from 1934 to 1943, and Libya became independent as a kingdom in 1951.
Libya between the Maghreb, the Arab League and the African Union
Within Africa, Libya is usually counted in the Maghreb, the western part of the Arab world. The Maghreb comprises Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia and the disputed territory of Western Sahara, while Egypt and Sudan, Libya’s eastern neighbours, belong to the Mashriq. Before the 20th century the term most often meant only Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, between the Mediterranean and the Atlas Mountains, so Libya sits on the boundary between the two halves of Arab North Africa. It is a member of the Arab Maghreb Union with Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia, although that bloc has been largely dormant since 2008.
Libya joined the Arab League in 1953, two years after independence, and Arabic is its language of government and daily life. Yet its African ties are just as formal. On 9 September 1999 the Organisation of African Unity met in an extraordinary session in Sirte, on the Gulf of Sidra, and adopted the Sirte Declaration, which announced the decision to establish the African Union. Libya is therefore African on every count that matters: by plate and landmass, by its six African neighbours, and by membership of the continent’s own institutions.
So when a map shows Libya sitting under Italy and Greece, the sea in between is the continental boundary. Everything south of the 1,770 km coastline, from the Jebel Akhdar to the dunes around Kufra, is Africa. To see how the Sahara stretches across the eastern half of the country and into Egypt, read our guide to the Libyan Desert, look at each of Libya’s six land frontiers in the countries that border Libya, or compare it with its western neighbours in our guide to the Maghreb countries.