Ghadames I

We joined a spur-of-the-moment trip to Ghadames last weekend; I can’t rave enough about this ancient Berber trading town (western edge of Libya, near the Algerian border). It’s something like a 14-hour round trip from Tripoli, and it’s worth the drive even to look around for only a few hours.


The drive maybe makes it even better, because it puts the town into the context of the caravan routes: here’s the view across the plain east, taken from the town of Nalut, roughly halfway between Tripoli and Ghadames, and the last major town before you hit the long southern drive. I’ll cover Nalut in a separate entry, because it has a Berber fortified granary (qasr), but the reason I include this photo now is because I want to show the scale of the land. Imagine the caravans from the coastal settlements crossing through this valley, heading for the pass up to the plateau.


Now imagine the caravans coming up from the south, through the Sahara: not that we went anywhere near the Sahara on this trek (Ghadames is an oasis in the Red Rocky Desert, Hamada al-Hamra), but you get the point – Ghadames would have been a rock-solid anchor of life to the traders crossing this land by camel. The drive strips away advertising clichés and reminds you of the real meaning of an oasis.


There’s been settlements in the area since the Romans and before, but the current preserved old town dates from around 800 years ago. It was still a thriving town till the early 1980s, when new houses were supplied to encourage modernisation; now it’s practically deserted for living, though mosques and livestock areas still appear to be in use (stories vary about whether the inhabitants were forced to move or not).




Ghadames had two main sections for two major families, with each having three or four sub-families, so that there are seven sections/ main streets/ squares/ mosques/ gates, plus the main square. The main square, with two mosques (one per major family), is actually pretty small given its importance for the seven families – it was a central place for news and water and would have been crowded. The al-kadus (‘the bottle’) niche, used for water distribution, is in this square – more about that next week.




Inside the city, the whitewashed mudbrick houses are wall-to-wall, end-to-end, and all the laneways are covered over to hide from the sun, so you feel like you’re walking underground. Only the main streets have skylights, and the way the light falls in the evening makes you want to take photos of light. You wouldn’t believe how beautiful it can be.

Off the main skylit streets are smaller streets, no skylights, leading directly into family residential areas, and they twist and turn back into the dark like the runs of a rabbit warren.