Palmeraie

The Palmeraie north of Marrakech is not a landscape that grew on its own. It is a man-made oasis: between the eleventh and twelfth centuries some fifty khettara were dug, underground galleries that reach the water table twenty to fifty metres down and carry it to the surface by gravity alone, with lines of wellheads marking their course across the ground. That network watered around twenty thousand hectares in its first centuries. Four dynasties extended it, and the desert steppe of the Haouz became a palm grove. The grove still works as farmland at its edges: date palms in dense rows, irrigation channels between them, vegetables and fruit trees in the shade, trunks used in roofing and fronds burnt in the ovens that bake bread and heat the hammams. Move deeper and tracks become paved roads, walls rise above the canopy, and riding centres, quad tracks and resort hotels occupy ground that was farmland within living memory. The coexistence is unresolved and visible. The shrinking is the real story. More than 80 percent of the khettara network is now destroyed or dry; the water table stood five metres down when the city was founded and now lies more than fifty. The grove covered 12,000 hectares in 1929 and 4,700 by 2001. Since 2007 a royal foundation programme has planted more than 600,000 young palms, watered partly with treated wastewater, with every tree inventoried and mapped. Come early or late, on foot or on horseback: the light through the fronds, the smell of earth and water, and on clear days the High Atlas to the south.