A painted figure from 6,000 BC. A bovine scene. Swimmers in a long-vanished lake. Hunters with bows. The Tassili n’Ajjer National Park contains one of the most remarkable concentrations of prehistoric art on the planet. UNESCO recognised it in 1982 as a cultural and natural World Heritage Site — a dual classification that less than a handful of places on earth hold.
Getting here requires commitment. The gateway is Djanet (more on that below), and visits are conducted by licensed Tuareg guides on foot and by camel through the plateau’s maze of sandstone arches, natural bridges and canyon corridors. But the commitment pays back with interest. To crouch before a painting made by a human hand twelve thousand years ago, in silence, in a landscape utterly unchanged from when it was made, is one of the genuinely humbling experiences travel can offer.
7. Ghardaïa — The City That Inspired Le Corbusier
In the 1930s, a young Swiss-French architect named Le Corbusier came to the M’Zab Valley in Algeria’s pre-Saharan south and was, by his own account, transformed. The five ksour — hilltop fortified towns — of the M’Zab had been built starting in the 11th century by the Ibadite Muslims, a sect with ancient roots and a genius for desert-adapted living. Their architecture: whitewashed, geometric, stripped of ornament, perfectly calibrated to manage heat and light and communal life. Le Corbusier never quite got over it.
