El Oued

The Souf was settled long before the town existed, but El Oued as it is known today grew from the arrival of Arab tribes, among them the Troud, who moved into this corner of the Grand Erg Oriental and learned to farm sand. The name means "the river" or "the valley", though no surface stream runs here. Without timber to span a roof, builders worked with what the ground gave them: gypsum quarried nearby, burnt and mixed into plaster, raised over rooms as low domes and barrel vaults. Whole quarters were built this way, and the skyline of pale cupolas gave the place its name, the city of a thousand domes.

Algeria's Saharan south came under French military control from the mid-nineteenth century, and the Souf was administered from a garrison post in El Oued. The most famous outsider to live here was the Swiss-born writer Isabelle Eberhardt, who settled in the town in 1900, dressed as a man, took the name Si Mahmoud Saadi and wrote about the desert and its Sufi brotherhoods before drowning in a flash flood at Aïn Séfra in 1904.

After independence in 1962 El Oued became the administrative centre of its own province, and the town expanded quickly on government money. Concrete replaced gypsum in the new quarters, deep wells replaced some of the labour of the old gardens, and the population multiplied several times over in a few decades. The domed houses survive in the older streets, and newer public buildings borrow the dome as a deliberate local signature.

El Oued's identity is built on two things: the architecture and the date. The domes are more than decoration — they shed the fierce sun, hold cool air and can be built without a single beam — and local pride in them is strong enough that banks, mosques and civic buildings copy the form in concrete. The second signature is agricultural. The ghout, the funnel-shaped hollow dug out of a dune so that palm roots can reach the water table, is a technique particular to the Souf and is maintained by hand, generation after generation.

The Souf is Arabic-speaking, tribal in its older social structure and religiously observant, with Sufi brotherhoods long established in the surrounding oases and Quranic schooling a traditional strength of nearby Guemar. Weddings are large and loud, henna and drumming carry the ceremony, and hospitality towards a guest is close to an obligation. Poetry recited in the local Arabic dialect is a respected local art, and the calendar follows the Islamic one, with Ramadan reshaping the day and the two Eids bringing families back from the northern cities.

Visitors are still unusual enough to be greeted with curiosity rather than indifference, and the norms are those of a conservative desert town: modest dress, restraint between men and women in public, and care with the camera. Friday is the quiet day, with the middle of it given over to prayers and the family meal.

About 135,000 people lived in the commune of El Oued at the 2008 census, with several hundred thousand more across the province and the neighbouring communes of Bayadha, Kouinine, Robbah and Debila, which have effectively become suburbs. Almost all of that growth is recent, and the built-up area now spreads far beyond the old domed core.

Agriculture is the backbone. Farming goes on in a sand sea: the ghout gardens produce Deglet Nour dates, and since the arrival of deep boreholes and pivot irrigation thousands of wells have allowed new farms of vegetables and cereals beyond the old hollows. Trade, transport, government employment and the construction that follows public money take up much of the rest of the workforce, and the Tunisian border a short distance east has always given the region a commercial edge.

Water is the local anxiety in both directions. The old gardens depend on a water table close to the surface, while decades of pumping, irrigation and waste water have raised it in places, waterlogging hollows and undermining buildings; deeper aquifers, meanwhile, are drawn down by the new farms. Daily life runs around the heat: an early start, a long pause through the middle of the day, and streets and cafés that fill again in the cool of the evening.

Dates run through everything. The Deglet Nour of the Souf is the variety with a name abroad — translucent, honey-flavoured and sold on the branch — but dozens of other kinds are eaten fresh, dried, stuffed with butter or almonds, pressed into paste for pastries, or simply taken with a bowl of buttermilk, which is the standard desert breakfast and the standard offering to a guest.

Everyday cooking is Algerian Saharan: couscous steamed over a stew of mutton and whatever vegetables the gardens have given, chorba soup thick with vermicelli or crushed wheat, and stews eaten with plenty of bread. Semolina does most of the work in the kitchen — as couscous, as thick flatbreads, and as the doughs used for filled pastries. Bread is often baked as a large round in a clay oven, and the oldest Saharan method, burying dough in hot sand and embers, is still known here. Camel meat appears in the market butchers alongside mutton, and grilled meat with bread and harissa is the standard cheap meal out.

Sweets lean on dates and honey, and the fried and syrup-soaked pastries made for Ramadan and for weddings are made in quantity. To drink there is sweet mint tea poured from a height, strong black coffee in the cafés, and cold buttermilk in the heat; alcohol is effectively absent from public life in the Souf.