Taghit

The hills around Taghit carry some of the best-known rock art in western Algeria: engravings of cattle, antelope, ostriches and other animals pecked into sandstone faces in the valleys nearby, made during the long green phase of the Sahara when herders moved through grassland where there is now sand. They are evidence of a population here thousands of years before the palm grove was planted.

The oasis in its present form grew around water and defence. The Oued Zousfana runs beneath the surface for much of its length and comes near enough to the top here to keep date palms alive, and the settlement that formed was built as a ksar — a fortified village of earth and stone, packed tightly on a rocky spur above the gardens, with blind outer walls, narrow covered lanes and storehouses for grain and dates. It sat on the caravan route down the Saoura between the Moroccan oases, Béchar and the Touat, and its position at the foot of a wall of dunes made it both a stop and a stronghold.

French forces moved into the Saoura around 1900, and the valley was administered as part of the Saharan territories, with Béchar growing into the regional centre on the back of coal mining at nearby Kenadsa. Taghit remained a small farming village. After independence its fortunes changed with the road: the combination of the ksar, the palm grove and an accessible dune field made it one of the established domestic tourist destinations of the Algerian Sahara, and hotels and guesthouses followed. The old ksar, largely abandoned for newer housing below, still stands over the gardens, and it and the zawiya are among the things visitors come to see.

Life in the Saoura oases has always been organised around two things: the palm grove and the ksar. Garden plots beneath the palms are small, walled and inherited, water rights are held in shares, and the date harvest in autumn is the event that the year turns on. The population mixes Arab and Berber descent with the Haratin families who historically worked the gardens, and family and neighbourhood ties are close in a village this size.

For Algerians, Taghit is above all a winter destination, and the village has built a modest culture of visitors around it: drivers, guides, guesthouses, camps out on the sand, camel rides and sand sledging on the dune face. The year-end holidays bring families from the north in numbers that transform the place for a fortnight, with music, bonfires and evening gatherings on the sand.

Older traditions persist alongside that. Music at weddings and religious occasions follows the Saharan pattern of drums, clapping and call-and-response singing, and Sufi shrines and zaouias in the valley — most famously at Kenadsa — remain important. Manners are conservative and unhurried: long greetings, tea offered immediately, modest dress, restraint between men and women in public, and Friday given over to prayers and family. Visitors who ask before photographing people and houses are generally welcomed warmly.

Taghit is a village rather than a town — the commune counted 6,317 people at the 2008 census — and it belongs administratively to Béchar Province, whose capital lies about 95 kilometres north. Most people live in the newer streets below the ksar, in concrete houses built since independence, while the old fortified village above is largely empty.

The economy rests on dates and garden farming in the palm grove, on public employment — the commune, the school, the clinic — and on tourism, which is seasonal and concentrated between November and March. A handful of hotels and guesthouses, drivers with 4x4s, guides and small shops make their money in those months, and many households also have members working in Béchar or further north. The shifting sand is a constant practical problem: dunes encroach on the palm grove and on the roads, and holding them back is routine work.

The day is shaped by heat and prayer. Activity starts early, the middle of the day is spent indoors or in the shade of the palms, and the street comes back to life in the late afternoon, when people walk out towards the dunes or gather in the cafés. Water supply, employment for the young and the slow drift of people towards the cities are the standing concerns here, as in most small Saharan communes.

Dates come first, as everywhere in the Saharan oases. The grove below the village produces several varieties, eaten fresh at the autumn harvest, dried for the rest of the year, stuffed with almonds or butter, or pounded into a paste that goes into sweets and travel food. Dates with milk or buttermilk is the standard offering to a guest and the standard breakfast in the desert.

Beyond that the cooking is plain Algerian Saharan food: couscous steamed over a stew of mutton, chickpeas and whatever vegetables the gardens give; chorba, a soup thickened with vermicelli or crushed wheat; and stews eaten with a lot of bread. Semolina does much of the work, in couscous, in thick round loaves and in the layered pan breads eaten at breakfast. Mechoui — a whole lamb or a shoulder roasted slowly over embers — is the dish for a celebration, and camps out in the dunes cook it for groups. The old desert method of baking a round of dough directly in hot sand under a fire is still known in the valley.

To drink there is sweet mint tea in small glasses, poured from a height and taken in rounds over a long conversation, strong black coffee in the cafés, and buttermilk in the heat. Alcohol has no public presence. Choice in the village is limited, and the best meals tend to be the ones cooked at a guesthouse or over a fire on the sand.