15. El Oued — The City of a Thousand Domes
There are cities that look strange from the air and ordinary at street level. El Oued is the reverse: perfectly unremarkable from a distance, but walk into the old quarters and suddenly you are in the middle of one of the most architecturally peculiar urban landscapes in North Africa. The houses here are capped with domed roofs — thousands of them, a forest of white cupolas built to minimise heat and shed sand — and they stretch in every direction, giving the city its extraordinary epithet.
El Oued sits on the edge of the Grand Erg Oriental, the Eastern Great Sand Sea, one of the largest dune fields on earth. The dunes around Oued Souf swallow the outskirts of the city, palm groves grow in pits dug down to the water table (a technique called ghout cultivation that has been practiced here for centuries), and the whole southern quarter of the city is a battle between sand and human determination that the sand is slowly, patiently winning. Visit the El Oued Museum for insight into the Souf’s particular desert culture, then hire a guide for a dune excursion into the Grand Erg at dusk. The silence out there, broken only by wind, is something you will not find in many places left on earth.
