old town ghadames (Ghadamis? Ghudamis?) was really quite quaint back in the mid-eighties when I took this photo with my Olympus XA.
Rather than demolish and build over the old town, the Ghadafi regime built a new town to the south-west of the old town and the two co-exist. ghadames is a camel's spitting distance from the southern most point in neighboring Tunisia, however the blacktop road runs to the border crossing with Algeria.
Where new-town ghadames has been built in the mechanized transport era, old town Ghadames traces it roots back to pre-Roman days. A desert oasis it was long a key way point on the Trans-Saharan trading routes.
The old town is still populated today. Even when I spent time there the traditional mud and lime buildings felt cooler that the newer air conditioned buildings. Indeed, some people owned property in both towns and sent the summer in the old town and the winter in the new town.
This photo was taken from just outside the old wall, near the water pool. The white tower and dome is part of one of the mosque complexes in the town – the white paint also serving to reduce the temperature on the inside. Just off frame to the right is one of the entrances to the old town.
If you enlarge the photo by clicking on it, you might notice that the dark shape near the center of the frame is actually a goat!
I visited Ghadames a number of times but took few photos. On this particular trip I was headed home so we'd driven in from the desert since our flight to Tripoli left in the late afternoon, we had a few hours to spend wandering around.
Like so many places I've visited, I'd love to go back and spend more time there making photographs but I don't see that happening for this particular location.
[ad name=”post”]
