Taghit is a town of mudbrick on a rock spur in western Algeria, with twenty kilometres of date palm on one side and the dunes of a great sand sea on the other. The Grande Dune rises almost 190 metres above the grove, and climbing its soft flank in the last hour of light puts mudbrick rooftops and green canopy against an ocean of sand. The crests turn rose as the sun drops. Every wall below it is clay dug straight out of the valley floor, mixed with palm fibre, packed thick and dried hard in the sun. Earth like that soaks up heat through the day and gives it back after dark — how the town handled the desert's swing between scorching afternoons and cold nights, long before any machine could.
The lanes inside the old ksar are covered, so you go from glare into near-dark and back again every few metres. They stay cool at midday while the sand outside bakes. In 1903 some four thousand Berber fighters surrounded a small French garrison sheltering behind those walls, outnumbering it roughly ten to one, and the fortified spur held through repeated assaults until the attackers withdrew. Out on the cliffs above the palm grove the rock carries engravings of elephants, giraffes and ostriches — no fantasy, but the animals that grazed here when the desert was open savanna. Finding the faces takes somebody from the town who can show you where they are. The fresh scratches beside the old lines are the other half of what you see. Visitors have cut and painted graffiti straight onto Neolithic panels, and someone tried to lever a whole panel off the rock. Algeria classified the site as national heritage in 2024, having never built the protection plan it approved in 2016. Back up in the ksar the doors stand shut on courtyard after courtyard as you pass. The families have moved down to the new town, and what is left is a hillside of rooms with almost nobody in them.