Kasbah Taourirt: Conserving earthen heritage in Morocco

A summary account by the principal CERKAS investigator and a Getty Conservation Institute collaborator of the multi-year Conservation and Rehabilitation Plan for Kasbah Taourirt. The paper documents the project methodology developed jointly by CERKAS and the Getty Conservation Institute between 2011 and 2018, with a focus on the planning process and the conservation policies that guided the physical interventions on the site.

The work argues for the broader applicability of the Taourirt methodology to other earthen sites in Morocco and the wider region, presenting Taourirt as a pilot case for an integrated approach combining documentation, emergency stabilisation, archival and oral history research, and the development of region-specific conservation standards.

The paper situates the Taourirt project within the longer institutional history of CERKAS, founded in the late 1980s after the long abandonment of the kasbah, and within the wider question of what kinds of intervention can be sustained at scale across the thousands of earthen kasbahs and ksour of southern Morocco — most of which lack the institutional attention, funding, and documentation that Taourirt has received.