Ghadames

Covered streets below, and a rooftop town above them

Ghadames, the pearl of the desert, is an oasis town in northwestern Libya, about 462 km southwest of Tripoli near the borders with Algeria and Tunisia. It lies in the pre-Sahara between the Great Erg sand sea and the stony Hamada el-Hamra, built around the Ain al-Faras spring, and it is one of the oldest pre-Saharan cities. Archaeology suggests people have lived here since the 4th millennium BC. The Romans, who called it Cydamus, sent the proconsul Lucius Cornelius Balbus against it under Augustus and later garrisoned it under Septimius Severus. Byzantine missionaries converted it to Christianity, Arab Muslims took it in the late 7th century, and for centuries it was a hub of the trans-Saharan caravan trade, including the trade in slaves, with settlers of its own as far away as Timbuktu.

The old town is shaped by the climate, where July averages 41 °C and a year brings only 73 mm of rain. It is round, walled by the reinforced outer walls of its houses, and interwoven with palm groves watered from the spring, a system still managed by the community under rules recorded in manuscripts. Each house divides its functions by floor: supplies on the ground, the family above, and the upper storeys overhanging the alleys so that the lanes are roofed over into what is almost an underground network of cool passages, where men and children met. On top, the open terraces linked from house to house were reserved for the women, a second town above the first. Seven clans each had their own district with a square for festivals. Walls are mud brick on stone foundations with palm-wood framing, limed white inside and decorated with incised and painted patterns.

In the 1970s the government built new houses outside the walls, and the old town emptied through the 1990s, though many families still move back in summer for its coolness. Moustapha Akkad filmed the Medina scenes of The Message here. During the 2011 civil war the town was besieged, and the BBC found its mixed Arab-Berber population and the Tuareg, neighbours for centuries, in bitter conflict; afterwards the Tuareg community was forced out.

UNESCO listed the old town in 1986 and kept it on the List of World Heritage in Danger from 2016 to 2025. It still notes the settlement's fragility, after a fire and heavy rains, to any change in its water and its people.