Ghadames

An oasis town built so that you can cross it without going outside. The houses run in vertical layers: storage at ground level, family rooms above, and the alleys between them are roofed over, so the middle of the old town is close to an underground network of covered passages, cool in a place that averages 41 C in July on 73 mm of rain a year. The rooftops are a separate world above that one, terraces linked together and used by the women, so there are two towns stacked on each other with different people moving through each. Seven clans held their own districts. People have been here since the fourth millennium BC and Rome called it Cydamus. UNESCO listed the old town in 1986 and put it on the World Heritage in Danger list in 2016 because of the civil conflict. Nalut District, about 462 km southwest of Tripoli.