In 1252/1836, during his three-month sojourn in the Wād Nūn town of Guelmīm, John Davidson, the British traveler, wrote diary entries that repeatedly announced the impending arrival of the large caravan or akābār returning from Timbuktu. He conveys the suspense lingering in the air as the people awaited with great anticipation the inbound camel train. But that year, the caravan never made it to port, or at least not in one piece, as it was raided by Saharan brigands who pillaged most of its loads before it reached the sūq, or market, of Guelmīm. A recent outbreak of smallpox also had kept people from going to market, and so that year the annual fair of Sīdī al-Ghāzī was a fiasco, much to the annoyance of Shaykh Bayrūk, the Tikna chief of Guelmīm.

In the nineteenth century, Guelmīm was the largest town in the region. It was a crossroads of Saharan and Atlantic exchange, operating as a terminus for caravan traffic coming from various Saharan oases and the southern desert-edge markets of western Africa.