Aït Benhaddou

The ksar stands on the old caravan road between the Sahara and Marrakesh, where traders coming up the Drâa and over the passes of the High Atlas needed a defensible stop. Fortified villages of this kind — ighrem in Tamazight, ksar in Arabic — were built collectively by extended families: thick walls of rammed earth around houses that shared a single gate, corner towers, and a communal granary on the highest ground where each household kept its grain under lock. No building in the village is ancient in the European sense, because earth architecture is renewed constantly, but the form and much of the fabric are old, and parts of the present ksar are usually dated to the 17th century and later.

The family group that gave the village its name, the Aït Benhaddou, farmed the narrow gardens along the Ounila and lived on the traffic of the road. That traffic ended when the French built the modern route over the Tizi n'Tichka pass in the 1930s, bypassing the Ounila valley and leaving the ksar without a purpose. Families moved across the river to the newer village, where water, electricity and the road were, and the old buildings were left to weather.

Two things saved it. Film crews arrived from the 1960s onwards, using the ksar as a ready-made ancient city, and UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage list in 1987, which brought conservation funding and rules about how repairs must be made. Tourism followed, and the earthen walls have since been maintained as much for visitors and cameras as for the few families who still live inside them.

This is an Amazigh village, Tamazight-speaking, in a valley of small farms where water rights, terraces and the date and almond harvests have shaped social life for centuries. The ksar is a collective building, and the rules of its upkeep — who repairs which wall, who holds which storeroom in the granary — belonged to the village assembly long before there was any heritage listing.

Its craft is earth. Walls are built of pisé, earth rammed between wooden shutters, or of sun-dried brick, plastered with a mix of earth and straw, and finished at the top with geometric patterns pressed into the surface. The technique needs constant attention: rain cuts the surface, and a wall left unrepaired for a few seasons returns to the soil. Craftsmen trained in this work are in demand across the region, and the pigment sellers, weavers and painters who keep stalls in the ksar sell work made with the same earth colours.

Film has left its own mark. Villagers have worked as extras, guides, builders and drivers for decades, and know exactly which corner appeared in which production. Customs otherwise are those of the rural south: greetings before business, the right hand for eating and giving, shoes off in a home, tea poured three times, and modest dress for both men and women, more so than in the coastal cities.

A few thousand people live in the commune, most of them in the new village on the eastern bank rather than inside the ksar, where only a small number of families remain. The old village has no proper water supply or drainage, and its lanes cannot take vehicles, so daily life long ago moved to the flat ground opposite.

Tourism supports almost everyone: guesthouses, hotels, restaurants, guides, stalls selling carpets, fossils and painted panels, and mule owners who carry luggage across the river. Film production adds an irregular second income when a crew is in the region. Around these, families still farm the strip of gardens along the Ounila — dates, almonds, olives, alfalfa and vegetables — and keep goats and sheep on the dry slopes behind.

The rhythm is set by the arriving traffic and the sun. Coaches and minibuses reach the village late in the morning and again in the afternoon, and the lanes fill for a couple of hours; early mornings and evenings are quiet enough to hear the river. Dry years have reduced the flow of the Ounila and the size of the gardens, and young people leave for Ouarzazate, Marrakesh or abroad, returning for festivals and the harvest.

Cooking here is the plain, slow food of the southern valleys. The tagine is the staple: lamb or goat with vegetables, chicken with preserved lemon and olives, or a Berber tagine of carrots, courgettes, potato and tomato stacked in a cone over charcoal and left for hours. Couscous, often of barley, is the Friday meal, and harira soup of tomato, lentils and chickpeas is eaten in the evening and at every sunset in Ramadan.

Bread does much of the work. Round khobz is baked daily in a clay oven, harsha, a semolina griddle cake, appears at breakfast with butter and honey, and msemen, a folded flaky pancake, is eaten with olive oil or argan oil. Omelettes with tomato and cumin, cooked in the tagine dish, are a standard light meal in the cafés overlooking the ksar.

What the valley itself grows is what tastes of the place: dates and almonds from the gardens along the Ounila, olives pressed for oil, figs, and honey from the hills. Amlou, the paste of argan oil, almonds and honey, comes over from the Souss and is served with bread at breakfast. Mint tea is constant, poured from height into small glasses, and it is offered at the start of any conversation, in a shop, a guesthouse or a carpet stall.