Taoudenni (also Taoudeni, Taoudénit, Taudeni, Berber languages: Tawdenni, Arabic: تودني) is a remote salt mining center in the desert region of northern Mali, 664 km (413 mi) north of Timbuktu.

In the late 1960s, during the regime of Moussa Traoré, a prison was built at the site and the inmates were forced to work in the mines.

[2] In 1906 the French soldier Édouard Cortier visited Taoudenni with a unit of the camel corps (méharistes) and published the first description of the mines.

[3] At the time the only building was the Ksar de Smida, which had a surrounding wall with a single small entrance on the western side.

Having removed the salt from the base area of the pit, the miners excavate horizontally to create galleries from which additional slabs can be obtained.

The men live in primitive huts constructed from blocks of inferior quality salt and work at the mines from October to April, avoiding the hottest months of the year, when only about 10 of them remain.

[12] Horace Miner, an American anthropologist who spent seven months in the town, estimated that in 1939-40 the winter caravan consisted of more than 4,000 camels and that the total production amounted to 35,000 slabs of salt.

The region is located in the middle of the Sahara Desert, in the southern part of the Tanezrouft (one of the harshest areas on the planet, known for extreme heat and aridity), and features an extreme version of the hot desert climate (Köppen climate classification BWh).

Averages high temperatures exceed 40 °C (104 °F) from April to September and reach an extreme peak of 47.9 °C (118.2 °F) in July, the highest value for such an elevation above sea level.