Ghadames

Springs in a hollow of the Saharan plateau made Ghadames possible. The Romans knew the oasis as Cydamus: the proconsul Lucius Cornelius Balbus reached it in the first century BC, a permanent garrison followed under Septimius Severus around AD 202, and Rome withdrew a few decades later. A bishop lived in the oasis in the sixth century, after Byzantine missionaries brought Christianity, and the Arab conquest of the seventh century brought Islam. Its Berber inhabitants kept their own language, which is still spoken.

For centuries the town was a hinge of the trans-Saharan trade. Caravans crossing between the Mediterranean coast and the Sahel stopped here for water, and Ghadamsi merchants kept settlers as far south as Timbuktu, dealing in gold, ivory, leather, textiles and enslaved people. That commerce built the old town, whose houses of mud brick, lime plaster and palm timber were raised over generations into an interlocking mass divided among seven clan quarters, each with its covered lanes, its public square and its share of the spring water.

The trade declined in the 19th century as sea routes took its traffic. Ottoman and then, from October 1911, Italian rule reached the oasis, and after Libyan independence the town found itself in a border triangle with Algeria and Tunisia. In the 1970s the government built new houses outside the walls, and the old town lost its permanent inhabitants through the 1990s, though the families who own the houses still maintain them and many return in the hottest months. The old town was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986, placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger between 2016 and 2025, and taken off that list after restoration work.

Ghadames is a Berber town. Ghadamès, an Eastern Berber language named after the oasis and unusual for how little Arabic it has absorbed, is spoken at home alongside Arabic, though estimates of the number of speakers vary widely. A Tuareg community formed part of the oasis until the conflict of 2011, after which it left. Saharan music, drumming and dance belong to weddings and to the town's festival, and a small local drum, the Ghadames darbuka, is played by women singers on festive occasions.

The old town's architecture encodes the town's social order. Ground-floor lanes, roofed over, were the men's world of movement and trade; the linked rooftop terraces above were the women's, allowing them to cross the whole settlement without descending to the street. Interiors are whitewashed and brightly painted, hung with mirrors and brass, and rooms are built for the extremes of the desert climate.

Water has its own customs. The output of the springs was divided into timed shares, administered by families with inherited rights, and the palm gardens still run on that logic of turns and channels. Hospitality follows Saharan form: tea boiled and poured in three rounds, an insistence that a guest eat, and long greetings. The town is small, everybody is known, and a visitor is noticed at once.

Around ten thousand people live in Ghadames, most of them Berber and nearly all of them in the new town. Work is in local government, schools, the hospital, the small airport, farming the gardens and trade that moves across or around the nearby borders. Dates, vegetables and livestock come from the oasis, and most other goods are trucked in on the long road from the coast.

The day is shaped by heat. Activity is concentrated in the early morning and the evening, with the middle of the day given to shade and rest in summer, and Friday is the day of prayer and family visits. Families still use the old town in the hottest months, when its thick walls and shaded lanes stay noticeably cooler than concrete houses, and they maintain their ancestral properties there.

The town's difficulties are those of a remote place in a divided country: power and water interruptions, thin medical services, an economy that lost the trans-Saharan trade long ago and the visitors who replaced it more recently, and a borderland where smuggling and armed groups affect security. Conservation of the mud-brick town needs constant repair after rain, and its upkeep depends on owning families and on funds that arrive unreliably.

Desert cooking here is built on dates, barley, wheat, lamb and camel. Bazin, a dome of unleavened barley dough eaten with a lamb stew, is as much a staple as it is on the coast, and couscous is steamed and served with meat and vegetables for family and festival meals. Shorba, a lamb and vegetable soup with mint and tomato paste, opens meals in Ramadan.

The palm gardens supply the oasis's own produce — several varieties of date, eaten fresh, dried, pressed into paste or boiled down into syrup, together with figs, pomegranates, olives and vegetables grown in the shade beneath the trees. Dates with milk or with a handful of nuts are the everyday offering to a visitor. Bread is baked flat in clay ovens, and dried and salted meat keeps where refrigeration is uncertain.

Tea is the ritual: green tea boiled with sugar until a foam rises, poured from a height into small glasses and drunk in three rounds, the last commonly served with peanuts or almonds. Coffee is less usual than on the coast. Alcohol is illegal in Libya, and there is none.