Timimoun

Timimoun grew where water could be brought to the surface. The Gourara sits on a sandstone basin whose groundwater lies slightly higher than the oasis floor, and generations of diggers exploited that difference with the foggara: a gently sloping tunnel, sunk from a line of shafts, that draws water out of the aquifer and runs it by gravity to the palm gardens. The technique belongs to a family of systems found from Iran to Morocco, and in the Gourara and the neighbouring Touat it made settled life possible in one of the driest places on earth. Around each foggara a ksar was built, a fortified village of mud brick, and Timimoun grew into the main one.

The oases lived on dates, on their gardens and on the trans-Saharan caravan trade that crossed this corner of the desert between the Niger and the Maghreb, carrying gold, salt, cloth and enslaved people northwards. Their populations reflected that traffic: Zenata Berbers, Arabs, and Haratin families whose ancestors worked the gardens. The distribution of foggara water, measured out in shares to the hour, was the central institution of the community and is still governed by inherited rights.

French forces took the Touat and Gourara around 1900, after a long dispute with Morocco over the oases, and Timimoun became a military and administrative post. Colonial builders adopted an ochre-red neo-Sudanese style, inspired by the mud architecture of the Sahel, and gave the town the walls, gateways and pointed buttresses that define it today. Since independence the town has become an administrative centre and, in winter, one of Algeria's best-known domestic tourist destinations.

This is Zenata Berber country. Taznatit is spoken alongside Arabic in the ksour of the Gourara, and the oases keep a strong sense of their own identity within the wider Sahara. The best-known expression of it is the ahellil, a long sung poetry performed at night by a chorus of men who answer a lead singer, with a reed flute and a drum, hands clapped in complex patterns and the group moving in a slow circle. It is religious and social at once, and it has been recognised by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage.

The year turns on the Sbouâ, the great pilgrimage held the week after the Prophet's birthday, when delegations from the surrounding ksour walk into town behind their banners and converge on the mausoleum of Sidi El Hadj Belkacem. It is the one time the whole Gourara gathers in one place, and the town fills with drumming, processions and visitors. Sufi devotion, saints' shrines and the authority of religious families run deep in the oases.

Water is a cultural as much as a technical matter. Shares in a foggara are inherited, traded and measured with a notched comb at a distribution basin, and the maintenance of the tunnels — dangerous, filthy work — has always been a collective duty. Manners are those of a conservative desert town: unhurried greetings, immediate hospitality, modest dress, and a reserve between men and women in public that visitors are expected to respect.

Timimoun is small — the commune counted around 33,000 people at the 2008 census, with more in the scattered ksour of the surrounding district — and it functions as the service centre for a wide area of oases. Administration, schools, the hospital, the market and the transport connections are all here, which is why people come in from the villages.

The economy rests on dates above all, with vegetables and cereals grown in the garden plots beneath the palms, and on government employment, trade and winter tourism. The town's hotels and drivers do most of their business between November and March, and the year-end holidays are the peak. Away from the oasis, the wider region's money comes from public works and from the irrigated farms developed around Adrar with deep boreholes.

The long-running local worry is water. Many foggaras have silted up or dried altogether as the water table has fallen, drawn down by modern pumping, and keeping the remaining channels flowing is both a livelihood and a cause; some have been restored with state support. Daily rhythm follows the heat and the calendar of prayer: activity early, a long shuttered pause in the middle of the day, then streets, cafés and market stalls coming back to life in the evening, with Friday given over to prayers and family.

Dates are the foundation. The Gourara grows many varieties, and they are eaten fresh at the harvest, dried through the year, stoned and pounded into a paste for pastries and travel food, and taken with a bowl of milk or buttermilk, which is the classic Saharan combination and the usual thing pressed on a guest. Date syrup and date-stuffed sweets appear at every celebration.

Everyday cooking is simple and cereal-based. Couscous steamed over a stew of mutton and oasis vegetables — carrots, turnips, pumpkin, chickpeas — is the Friday and festival dish; chorba, a soup thickened with vermicelli or crushed wheat, is eaten most evenings, especially in Ramadan. Semolina also becomes thick flatbreads and the layered, pan-cooked breads found across Algeria, and the old desert method of baking a round of dough in hot sand under a fire is still understood here. Goat and mutton are the common meats, and camel meat turns up in the butchers.

To drink there is sweet mint tea, poured from a height into small glasses and taken in rounds, and strong black coffee in the cafés; buttermilk is the local answer to the heat. Alcohol is absent from public life. Meals in town are straightforward — grilled meat, soup, couscous — and the more interesting eating usually happens in somebody's house or at a camp out among the dunes.