Great Sand Sea
el Gran Mar de Arena
The Great Sand Sea is a vast stretch of dunes cutting through Essos from north to south, an empty span separating the Bones from the lands opening toward Yi Ti.
Beneath its sand lies the memory of another landscape: valleys with water, cities with names, an empire that no longer exists.
Chapter 1
From the Rhoyne Hills to Yi Ti
Books only
The desert runs through much of the continent, from the Rhoyne Hills to the lands of Yi Ti, in a north-to-south stretch that splits inner Essos in two.
The Bones border it to the west, and in the gap between the range and the sand a handful of cities survive, among them Kayakayanaya and Bayasabhad.
To the east the desert ends at the plains ridden by the Jogos Nhai and the waters of the Shivering Sea, with Tiqui as one of the few settled points on that shore.
Maesters who have studied the region disagree on its climate: some describe a scorching far south and a north that grows colder every year. Some claim, without proof, that all this sand once covered an inland sea.
Chapter 2
The empire the Drought dried up
Books only
Before it was desert, this land held rivers and lakes able to sustain fertile fields. It belonged to the Patrimony of Hyrkoon, a realm now gone that once carried weight in this part of Essos.
A period the sources call the Drought dried those valleys into the sand that covers them now. The Patrimony's cities did not survive it: they were left as ruins scorched by the sun.
The physical world
Esta última está conectada a Shamyriana a través de un camino que cruza la región.
Geography · The Lands of Ice and Fire
What we are not sure about
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.