Kasbah Taourirt

Kasbah Taourirt sits at the centre of Ouarzazate, at the confluence of the Drâa and Dadès valleys — a strategically critical location on the Saharan trade routes throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The site is a 1.6-hectare four-level complex of rammed earth and adobe, with elaborately decorated interior surfaces in its principal rooms.

According to oral tradition the original kasbah was built in the seventeenth century by the Imzwarn family. With greater certainty, the kasbah was taken over and significantly expanded in the late nineteenth century by the Glaoua family, whose patriarch Madani El Glaoui and brother Thami El Glaoui (later Pasha of Marrakesh under the French Protectorate) used Taourirt as one of their principal regional seats. The Glaoua expansion is responsible for most of the surviving fabric, including the painted ceilings and decorated reception rooms.

After Moroccan independence in 1956 and the dispossession of the Glaoua, the kasbah passed through state and family hands and was sold to the Ouarzazate municipality in 1972. It was largely abandoned until the late 1980s, when CERKAS — the Centre for the Conservation and Rehabilitation of the Architectural Heritage of the Atlas and sub-Atlas zones — was established and began conservation work.

In 2011 the Getty Conservation Institute partnered with CERKAS to develop a Conservation and Rehabilitation Plan for the site, the first integrated methodology of its kind for southern Moroccan earthen heritage. The plan combined emergency stabilisation, full architectural documentation through photogrammetry and HBIM by the Carleton Immersive Media Studio, archival research, oral history collection, and the development of conservation policies intended to be applicable across the broader corpus of southern Moroccan earthen sites. The Caïd Residence within the kasbah was the focus of intensive surface documentation work in 2013.

A small portion of the kasbah is open to the public as a historical attraction. Other unrestored sections continue to be inhabited by squatter families. CERKAS itself is headquartered within the kasbah complex.