Taghit is a thousand-year-old mudbrick fortress guarding a ribbon of date palms at the edge of one of the Sahara's great sand seas. Its stacked ochre houses and covered lanes were raised from the 11th century onward on a spur of rock above the Oued Zousfana, whose water feeds a palm grove that runs more than 20 kilometres along the valley between the dunes of the Grand Erg Occidental and the bare ridge of the Djebel Baroun. For generations it guarded a caravan crossing on the routes that carried salt, gold and ivory between Timbuktu and the Mediterranean. Eighteen kilometres south, at Zaouia Tahtania, cliff faces hold some of the oldest rock engravings in the Sahara — elephants, giraffes and ostriches, cut in an age when the desert still ran with grass and water.
From the ramparts the ground drops into a wall of green fronds and then climbs again into the dunes of the erg, whose crests shift from pale gold at midday to deep amber and rose as the sun falls. Visitors climb the great dune on foot or by camel for that hour of colour, wander the shaded alleys of the old town, and follow the Zousfana's slow water beneath thousands of palms — an abrupt meeting of stone, water and sand that has made Taghit one of the most painted and photographed oases in the Algerian Sahara. The old ksar stands largely empty now, its families long moved to the newer town beside it, and the carvings at Tahtania have suffered from graffiti and neglect. Yet Taghit is still a living desert town and a rare, reachable taste of the deep Sahara, mildest and clearest from autumn to spring when the daytime heat loosens its grip.