Douz

Douz grew where the Nefzaoua oases meet the sand. Springs at the edge of the Chott el Djerid basin allowed date palms and gardens, and the settlement served as the last watering point for caravans heading south and east across the Grand Erg Oriental — routes that carried dates, salt, cloth and, for centuries, slaves between the Sahel and the Mediterranean coast. The Roman limes ran through this country, and the fort at Ksar Ghilane out in the sand marks its southern reach.

The town's modern identity belongs to the Mrazig, descendants of the Banu Sulaym, who reached Tunisia from the east by the thirteenth century and long lived between the oasis and the desert, herding camels and sheep and wintering in tents in the erg. Douz was their market and their fixed point: a place to sell livestock and dates, buy grain and cloth, and settle disputes. French administration of the far south as a military territory from the late nineteenth century, and later the policies of the independent state, gradually pulled the nomads into permanent housing around the grove.

Two things changed the town in the twentieth century. Deep boreholes greatly expanded the palm groves and made commercial date growing possible, and the desert itself became a product: the International Festival of the Sahara, begun as a camel festival in 1910 and reshaped into its present form in 1967, turned camel racing, hunting hounds and Bedouin poetry into an annual event, and camel trekking grew into the town's best-known trade. Tourism has risen and fallen sharply with security scares elsewhere in the country, but the title the town gave itself — the gateway to the Sahara — has stuck.

Mrazig culture is what distinguishes Douz from the other oasis towns. It is Bedouin in memory and oasis-dwelling in practice: families keep camels even when they farm dates, tents are still put up for weddings and festivals, and the poetry, songs and dances of the desert are performed rather than only recorded. The sloughi, the North African sighthound once used for hunting gazelle, is bred here and shown at the festival, as are horses and racing camels.

The International Festival of the Sahara each December is the town's great public occasion, bringing groups from across Tunisia, Libya and Algeria for several days of racing, music, marriage displays and craft markets on the sand ground outside town. Weddings are the other large gatherings, lasting days and involving the whole neighbourhood, with henna nights, drumming and processions.

Craft work follows desert materials: wool woven into blankets and the striped cloaks men wear against the cold, palm fronds turned into baskets, mats and roofing, and leather and silver worked for saddlery and jewellery. Dress is more traditional than on the coast — turbans and long cloaks are ordinary rather than ceremonial in winter — and social life is strongly divided between male café society and family households. Visitors are common but the town remains small enough that guests are noticed and greeted.

The municipality counted just over 30,000 people at the 2014 census, making it the largest town of the southern Nefzaoua, and villages such as Zaafrane lie along the desert edge nearby. Most housing is single-storey and spread along the grove's margins, and families are large by Tunisian standards; many have relatives working in Tunis, on the coast or abroad and sending money home.

The economy has three legs: dates, livestock and tourism. Deglet nour from the Nefzaoua groves is sold across Tunisia and exported, sheep and camels are raised on the desert margin, and hotels, guides, camel owners and camp operators live on visitors from October to April. That last income is volatile — attacks elsewhere in the country and periods of instability in neighbouring Libya have emptied the town's hotels for seasons at a time — and unemployment among young people is high.

Water shapes everything. The groves depend on deep wells rather than the old springs, the water table has fallen, and salinity and the encroachment of sand onto gardens are constant work: palm-frond fences are planted in lines across the dunes to hold them back. The day starts early in the grove and the market, pauses through the afternoon heat behind shutters, and picks up again at dusk on the café terraces of the square.

Cooking in Douz is desert cooking, plain and built around what keeps. Couscous appears at the centre of most family meals, steamed over a stew of lamb or vegetables; mechoui, whole lamb roasted slowly, marks celebrations; and kadid, meat salted, spiced and air-dried, is stirred into couscous and stews through the year. Chorba, a peppery broth with fine pasta, opens meals, especially during Ramadan, and harissa is on every table.

A local speciality is bread baked in the sand: a flat unleavened dough buried under hot sand and embers, then dusted clean and torn by hand, usually eaten with olive oil, dates or a stew at a desert camp. Dates themselves are the town's staple and its cash crop — deglet nour eaten fresh in autumn, dried for the rest of the year, stuffed with almond paste, or boiled into a dark syrup — and legmi, the sweet sap tapped from a palm, is drunk fresh in the morning.

Camel meat is eaten in the south, sold at butchers in the market and stewed or grilled. Vegetables from the oasis gardens, olives, and strong goat's and sheep's milk cheeses fill out the table. Mint tea, boiled long over coals and poured foaming into small glasses, often with pine nuts or roasted almonds, is drunk all day and is the standard welcome for a guest.