CERKAS

CERKAS is the Moroccan state agency responsible for the conservation and rehabilitation of the architectural heritage of the Atlas and sub-Atlas zones — in practice, the principal institutional body working on the kasbahs, ksour, and igherman of southern Morocco. Founded in 1989 under the Ministry of Culture and headquartered at Kasbah Taourirt in Ouarzazate, the agency operates with limited resources across a vast and largely vulnerable corpus of sites.

The agency's most internationally visible work has been its partnership with the Getty Conservation Institute on the Conservation and Rehabilitation Plan for Kasbah Taourirt (2011 onward), which has produced both the most thorough modern documentation of a southern Moroccan earthen complex and a methodology intended to be transferable to other sites in the region. The CIMS Carleton collaboration on photogrammetry and HBIM at Taourirt extended the documentation capability to digital heritage standards.

CERKAS is also the body formally identified by UNESCO as responsible for monitoring the integrity of the Aït Ben Haddou inscription. The agency monitors that property and other regional heritage sites with limited capacity and persistent funding constraints.

The institutional culture is field-led and conservation-driven. The agency does not maintain a substantial public-facing digital presence; its outputs reach the wider world primarily through its international academic collaborators rather than through direct publication.