These ingeniously designed, 500-year-old “banks” offer a glimpse into Morocco’s Indigenous heritage amidst some of the country’s most ruggedly beautiful, untamed and lesser-explored landscapes.
“The Amazigh tribes built these ancient structures from the mountains around us,” says key keeper Hassan Louz, as he pushes open a palm-wood door to reveal the labyrinthine vaults of one of Morocco’s oldest igoudar – storehouses built by the region’s Indigenous tribes centuries ago to protect their most valuable possessions.
Ingeniously built from the jagged stone, adobe clay and palm trees of the Anti-Atlas Mountains, some 600 igoudar (the plural form of agadir – Amazigh for “wall” or “compound”) dot the windswept landscapes of the Souss-Massa region in southern Morocco.
They tell the story of how these sun-scorched uplands were first settled around the 15th Century when the Amazigh, or “free people” – North Africa’s Indigenous tribes – began to abandon nomadism, adopt farming and establish permanent desert outposts.
Widely regarded by historians as among the world’s oldest banking systems, igoudar eventually became the centre of Amazigh influence in the region, acting as spaces of governance, trade and debate as well as communal storehouses. Today, they offer a glimpse into Morocco’s Indigenous heritage amidst some of the country’s most ruggedly beautiful, untamed and least explored landscapes.