Ghoufi
Interesting facts
- The river's Berber name, Ighzir Amellal, means "white river", the same meaning as its Arabic name, Oued Abiod.
- The canyon runs across the Aurès from Tifelfel to M'Chouneche, and the cliff villages sit in the bends of its meanders.
- The cliff houses are generally said to be about four centuries old, though some accounts trace the settlement back to the fourteenth century.
- Besides houses and granaries, the villages had a mosque, a marabout's shrine, suspended footpaths and small irrigated gardens.
- Built of stone, clay, palm branches and tree trunks, the houses stayed mild in winter and cool in the scorching Aurès summer.
- In the early twentieth century a hotel of the Compagnie Transatlantique was built at the site to receive travellers drawn by the view.
Why it is worth it
Along the edge of a deep canyon in the Aurès Mountains, abandoned stone villages cling to ledges in the cliff, one above another, looking down on a ribbon of date palms and orchards beside the river. These are the Balconies of Ghoufi (also written Rhoufi), where the Oued Abiod has cut a gorge three to four kilometres long through layered rock, with walls that in places rise more than two hundred metres above the valley floor.
The canyon is a geological cross-section as much as a landscape. Its walls expose clearly separated strata of sedimentary rock from the Mesozoic era, stacked in bands that can be read from rim to riverbed, and the villages perched on its ledges are what give the "balconies" their name. At the bottom, the river sustains an oasis of palms and fruit trees, a startling strip of green against the bare ochre slopes of the Aurès.
The villages on the ledges were built by the Chaouia, the Berber people of the Aurès. Several hamlets, among them Hitesla, Idharene, Ath Mimoune, Ath Yahia, Ath Mansour and Taouriret, step down the cliff in tiers. Their houses were made of roughly dressed stone set in local mortar, with beams of tree trunks and palm wood, and some were dug partly into the rock. Each settlement had its taqliath, a tall communal granary of several storeys used to store harvests safely. The houses were lived in until the 1970s and now stand empty, their walls blending into the rock from which they were built. The area forms part of an Aurès site placed on UNESCO's Tentative List of World Heritage.
The Aurès, a rugged mountain region of north-eastern Algeria, is the historic homeland of the Chaouia, and Ghoufi is one of the places where their traditional way of building can still be read most clearly.
Getting there
The canyon lies in Batna Province, about 28 km in a straight line from the town of Arris. The nearest airport is Biskra–Mohamed Khider (BSK), about 48 km away in a straight line.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Ghoufi, also known as the Rhoufi, Balconies of Ghoufi and the Ghoufi Canyon, is a historic settlement and tourist site in the village of T'kout in Batna Province, Algeria. The canyon, located in the Aures Mountains and Abiod River Valley, was carved by the Abiod River and stretches for 3 to 4 kilometers. The site is remarkable for the Balconies of Ghoufi, which overlook an oasis.
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