Erg Chebbi
Interesting facts
- About 65 of the 100 metres of the star dune Lala Lallia piled up only within the last thousand years, a remarkably fast growth for a dune.
- The Berber name Lala Lallia is usually translated as the highest sacred point.
- Scientists dated the dune by optically stimulated luminescence, which reveals when buried sand grains last saw daylight.
- Its oldest sand dates to the Younger Dryas, an abrupt cold spell around 12,000 to 13,000 years ago.
- Inside the dune, the old surface marking its long pause holds pottery shards, fossil root casts and fulgurites, glassy tubes made by lightning striking sand.
- Although star dunes are common in today's deserts, they are almost never found preserved in ancient rock, which made dating Lala Lallia a first.
- Over the past nine centuries Lala Lallia has crept westward at an average of about 55 centimetres a year, and its pace is accelerating.
- In the hottest months, burial in the sun-heated sand of the dunes is a traditional local treatment for rheumatism.
Why it is worth it
Erg Chebbi is the Sahara as the imagination paints it: a single sea of sand rising abruptly out of the flat black stone desert of south-eastern Morocco, close to the Algerian border. The dune field runs about 28 kilometres from north to south and five to seven kilometres across, and its highest crests stand up to 150 metres above the surrounding hamada. Its colour is what stays with people. Under the midday sun the sand looks pale and almost flat, but at dawn and in the last hour before dark the dunes turn a deep apricot and then rust red, while the knife-edged ridges throw long blue shadows down their lee slopes.
Its tallest forms are star dunes, pyramids of sand with several arms radiating from a central summit, built by winds that blow from different directions through the year. One of them, known by the Berber name Lala Lallia, has been studied in detail: about 100 metres high and some 700 metres across, it began forming around 13,000 years ago, then stopped growing for roughly 8,000 years, and has put on most of its present bulk in the last few thousand years while creeping slowly westward at around half a metre a year. The highest summit in the erg, popularly called Lalla Merzouga, is the traditional place to climb before sunrise, when the whole field of crests below slowly takes shape out of the dark.
The dunes sit in the old country of the Tafilalet oasis. The nearby town of Rissani, today officially named Moulay Ali Cherif, stands close to the ruins of Sijilmassa, which grew rich between the eighth and fourteenth centuries by controlling the caravan routes across the Sahara. Along the western edge of the erg lies the village of Merzouga, the base for camel treks and nights in desert camps, and a few kilometres to the south the village of Khamlia is known for its Gnawa musicians, who play the gimbri lute and the clattering iron qraqeb. After rain a shallow seasonal lake, Dayet Srji, can form on the plain near the dunes and draws migrating birds, including flamingos.
The dunes are not always gentle neighbours: in 2006 floods at their edge destroyed many buildings and killed three people. The mildest months, and the ones most people choose, run from October to April.
Getting there
The dunes lie about 30 km in a straight line from Rissani (Moulay Ali Cherif); Merzouga, on the western edge of the erg, is about 40 km from Rissani by road and some 60 km beyond it is Erfoud. The nearest airport is Moulay Ali Cherif Airport at Errachidia (ERH), about 95 km away in a straight line and roughly 130 km by road through the Ziz valley; Supratours runs buses from Errachidia to Merzouga, a trip of a little over three hours. From Merzouga the dunes are reached on foot, by camel or by four-wheel drive.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Erg Chebbi is one of Morocco's several ergs – large seas of dunes formed by wind-blown sand. It is located on the far western edge of the Sahara Desert. Other ergs in Morocco include Erg Chigaga near M'hamid.
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