The name La Güera comes from the Spanish word '''' which is a ditch that carries rainwater to crops.
Foundation and settlement La Güera came into existence in late 1920, when Spanish colonizer
Francisco Bens (who had earlier taken possession of the
Cape Juby region as a
protectorate in 1916), after negotiating with tribal chiefs of the zone, established a
fort and an air base on the western side of the
Ras Nouadhibou peninsula, just a few kilometers away from the
French settlement of Port-Étienne (now
Nouadhibou) on the eastern side of the peninsula. (In the 1912
Convention of Madrid, Spain and France had agreed on a border between Mauritania and Spanish possessions that ran down the middle of the peninsula.) In 1924, La Güera was incorporated into the Spanish colony of
Río de Oro. During the short period (1920–1924) that the town was ruled as a separate part of the colony it released
its own postage stamps. The town was served by
La Güera Airport until the 1970s.
Western Sahara War In 1979, when Mauritania withdrew from the
war, La Güera's population was estimated to be 816 inhabitants. Since the
Alegal Madrid Tripartite Agreement of 1975 it remains
Territory in dispute. Before the long Sahrawi liberation war, the city was famous for its rich marine fauna:
the monk seal as a symbol of the City, cetaceans and the special relationship of symbiosis in the art of fishing of these (
dolphins) with fishermen belonging to the segment of the Sahrawi population most attached to Berber customs whose
Amazigh language was still preserved, in the highest proportion of the territory, in addition to techniques and linguistic terms in common with Spanish fishermen from the
Canary Islands and brothers of the same ethnic group
imraguen, from the Mauritanian side. The times when the
Canary-Saharan fishing bank functioned at full capacity for the local people are now only memories of the yesterday. By 2002, it had been still abandoned and partially overblown by sand, inhabited only by a very few
Imraguen fishermen and guarded by a
Mauritanian military outpost, despite this not being Mauritanian territory. ==Twin towns and sister cities==