© M. Ricchi
The Algerian south-east is home to that part of the desert considered to be the most spectacular and fascinating of the entire immense Sahara.
Starting from the ancient Djanet oasis, the main caravan centre at the foot of the spectacular Tassili n‘Ajjer plateau (a UNESCO World Heritage Site), the adventure begins into an enchanted world of sand with a thousand shades, Shaped by the wind into majestic fire-red dunes or flattened into immense straw-coloured expanses, from which soar rocky canyons and gueltas, mushrooms and spires, pinnacles and cathedrals, created by one and the same mastery, nature, with the help of time.
The Oued In Djaren hides the secrets of a thousand-year history in the ravines of its rocky gorges, the evidence of green valleys inhabited by wild animals and fertile pastures, before the sand submerged everything and men abandoned sheep farming and agriculture to become, in recent centuries, a nomadic population, today’s Touareg, dedicated to caravan traffic and the breeding of dromedaries, the only animal able to survive in the desert.
Paintings and engravings depicting herds of grazing oxen, elephants and giraffes, as well as propitiatory ritual scenes, point to fertile expanses, human settlements and also to the sacredness of these ravines, used as shelter and places of worship.
Today there are no longer green meadows, but the spectacle that appears before our eyes is that of an ocean of sand, which congeals into majestic waves at Moul n’Aga, at Monkhor, in Erg Admer, into dunes ablaze with red at Tin Merzouga, perhaps among the most spectacular dune ranges in the whole of the Sahara. From time to time they stand out, the lighthouses of the desert, spires and rocky pinnacles crumbling into the most surreal forms, or just like islands in the middle of the sea whose reefs suddenly appear, here are the imposing rocky walls of the canyons, the cliffs, the embankments delimiting the oued. Mount Gauthier, the Tafassasset oued, the miraculous arches of Alidemma, the stone treasure chest of Tagharghart that holds the secret engraved in the rock of the Vache qui pleure (the weeping cow).
