Cannibal Sands

Arenas de los Caníbales

Not to be confused with Cannibal Sands (desert).

Far in eastern Essos, well beyond the lands Westerosi maps dare to name, two stretches of desert share the same grim name: the Cannibal Sands. No reliable account has ever come out of them, only the rumor that is enough to make merchants and caravan drivers go around rather than through.

Chapter 1

The western sands

Books only

The more westerly of the two sands opens up northeast of the Bleeding Sea. N'ghai lies to its northwest, Mossovy further north, and to the east the sands themselves blur into the Grey Waste with no clear border.

The only fixed points to navigate by are two cities: Nefer to the northwest, and K'Dath to the south. Between them, nothing but dunes.

Chapter 2

The sands that vanish east

Books only

The second stretch of sand lies much further off, northeast of the Barren Chasm. It too merges into the Grey Waste, to the west and to the north, and keeps spreading past everything that has ever been mapped.

Its known neighbors are the Bone Town and K'Dath, both to the west of its dunes. Beyond that, no one has come back to say what lies there.

Chapter 3

Those who eat men

Books only

Of the people who live in these sands only one reputation travels: that they feed on human flesh. There is no firsthand account, no tribal name, nothing beyond that same rumor passed from mouth to mouth by those who have never set foot inside.

The physical world

Se dice que los habitantes de las arenas son unos bárbaros que se alimentan de carne humana.

Population · A World of Ice and Fire

What we are not sure about

  1. PositionWe worked it out

    The position was inferred from the label on the base map rather than from a symbol of its own: it marks the area, not the point.

  2. Spanish nameWe worked it out

    The Spanish name is the atlas’s own reviewed translation, not the one in the published Gigamesh edition, which does not fix it.

According to the Hielo y Fuego Wiki · Arenas de los Caníbales · 2026-07-30

Where each datum comes from
Position
centroid of the desert bearing this name
English name
visual reading of the label
Spanish name
the atlas’s own translation, reviewed
Label on the base map
431
What was read
CANNIBAL SANDS
Features averaged into the centroid
12
Base map
atlas-known-world-2019.png · Adam Whitehead, Atlas of Ice and Fire

Entry written on .