In 1926, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry joined Aéropostale, the French airmail company that Pierre-Georges Latécoère had founded in Toulouse in 1918. The idea was lunatic: fly mail from France to West Africa and eventually South America, over the Pyrenees, down the coast of Spain, across the Strait to Morocco, then south along the Atlantic edge of the Sahara — Casablanca, Agadir, Cap Juby, Villa Cisneros, Port-Étienne, Saint-Louis — all the way to Dakar. Seventeen thousand kilometres. In open-cockpit biplanes that cruised at 160 kilometres an hour and broke down constantly.
The Morocco stretch was the most dangerous. South of Agadir, the coastline belongs to the desert. The terrain below was Spanish Sahara — unpoliced, unmapped, home to nomadic tribes who viewed downed French pilots as currency. If your engine failed and you survived the landing, you waited. Sometimes a rescue plane came. Sometimes the tribes came first. Ransoms were negotiated. Some pilots were held for months. Saint-Exupéry became the company's best negotiator with the Moors — he learned their customs, drank their tea, earned something close to respect.
The Aéropostale route: Toulouse to Dakar. Satellite terrain with 3D elevation. Cap Juby — where Saint-Exupéry was station chief — marked in red. Click markers for details.
In 1927, he was appointed station chief at Cap Juby — now Tarfaya, on Morocco's far southern coast. He was twenty-seven years old. His job was to maintain the airstrip, service the planes, keep the route running, and recover any pilot who went down between Agadir and Villa Cisneros. The station was a tin-roofed building on a wind-blasted coast. The Atlantic on one side, the Sahara on the other. Nothing in between.
He stayed two years.
He flew the mail at night, navigating by stars and the occasional landmark visible in moonlight. When the stars disappeared behind cloud, he flew by dead reckoning — mathematics and faith. The planes had open cockpits. He flew wrapped in leather, frozen at altitude, alone with the engine noise and the dark.
Everyone crashed eventually. In 1935, attempting a Paris-to-Saigon speed record, he went down in the Libyan desert and nearly died of thirst before Bedouins found him. But even the Cap Juby years had their emergencies — downed pilots he flew out to rescue, nights spent beside wreckage waiting for dawn, conversations with nomads who had never seen a European.
He wrote about it in "Wind, Sand and Stars" and "Southern Mail" — books about flight that are really about solitude, duty, and what humans find when everything else is stripped away. The desert taught him that.
And then there is the Little Prince.
A pilot crashes in the Sahara and meets a small boy from an asteroid. The boy talks about a rose, a fox, a snake. He asks questions that adults have forgotten to ask. The story is a children's book that is not for children — or is for the children that adults used to be. It has been translated into more than 300 languages, making it the most translated non-religious book in human history.
Saint-Exupéry wrote it in New York during World War II, but the desert is Morocco's desert. The stars are the stars he navigated by over the Atlantic coast. The silence is the silence he found when the engine stopped and he waited in the sand for rescue or death.
He disappeared on 31 July 1944, flying a reconnaissance mission over occupied France. His plane was found near Marseille in 2003. He had spent his life falling out of the sky; eventually, the sky kept him.
Today, Tarfaya has the Musée Antoine de Saint-Exupéry — small, carefully curated, geographically authentic. Maps of the Toulouse–Dakar route. Photographs of pilots and mechanics. Models of the Bréguet 14s and Latécoère 25s that were barely more than kites with engines. Editions of the Little Prince in dozens of languages. And outside, the wind — the same wind that blew sand into the hangar ninety years ago.
But the Little Prince is still in the desert, talking to foxes, watching sunsets, asking the questions that matter.
The desert south of Tarfaya, where Saint-Exupéry landed, is on our deep south itinerary. The wind hasn't changed since 1927.
Tell us about your trip →The Facts
- —Latécoère founded the airline Christmas Day 1918 with the Toulouse–Barcelona route
- —Saint-Exupéry joined as a pilot in 1926, first flying Toulouse–Casablanca
- —He was station chief at Cap Juby (Tarfaya) from 1927 to 1929
- —The full route ran Toulouse–Barcelona–Alicante–Casablanca–Agadir–Cap Juby–Villa Cisneros (Dakhla)–Port-Étienne (Nouadhibou)–Saint-Louis–Dakar
- —By 1930 Aéropostale transported 32 million letters per year over 17,000 km
- —The Little Prince has been translated into 300+ languages
- —Saint-Exupéry disappeared 31 July 1944; wreckage found near Marseille in 2003
- —Tarfaya has a museum dedicated to him and the Aéropostale era
Sources
- Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de. Terre des hommes. Gallimard, 1939
- Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de. Vol de nuit. Gallimard, 1931
- Webster, Paul. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: The Life and Death of the Little Prince. Macmillan, 1993
