Throughout 19th and 20th century Europe, the Sahara Desert constituted an object of mystery, fear and fascination. Owing to a vivid history of warfare and conquest between Europe and the Maghrib, the Sahara was surrounded with orientalist fantasies. Depictions of the Sahara in European arts and literature abounded of racialised, eroticised, and sexualised stereotypes. In many of its representations, the Sahara was often depicted as a space of masculinity, virility and violence. In this paper, I look at how artistic and literary productions of Sahara reflected these assumptions. Using colonial imagery of the Sahara from the European imperial period, I revisit how this space was imagined, produced, and represented. To this end, I mainly use images from French weekly newspaper Le Petit Journal Illustré: Supplément du Dimanche corroborated with writings and reports of novelists, voyageurs, and military officers in North Africa between late 19th century and early 20th century. Based on these documents, I argue the Sahara was imagined as a space of violence, masculinity and hetero(sexuality). I draw an analogy with contemporary Euro-American media depictions of the Sahara, in which terrorist groups are often portrayed in the form of neo-desert warriors in essentialised, racialised and sexualised ways. I conclude that the image constructed on the Sahara during the colonial period still resonates today in media productions, and continues to feed racist and sexist assumptions about this region.< Réduire