Goulimime
POP 96,000
Once the ‘Gateway of the Sahara’, dusty Goulimime (or Guelmim) sprang up as a border town
where farmers from the fertile Souss traded with nomads from the south.
In its heyday, Tuareg, the so-called ‘blue men’, came in from the desert to buy and sell
camels at the weekly souq. In the evenings, women performed the mesmerising guedra dance
to the sound of a drumbeat. Today, you might only get a taste of this during the weeklong
moussem (festival) and camel fair held here in July or August (the dates change).
If you have come from the north, you will still recognise Goulimime as a border town. For the
first time, you will see Saharawi in the majority. But there is little reason to stop, the only tourist
sight being the unremarkable ruins of the early-20th-century Palace of Caid Dahman (admission
free), in the street behind Hotel de la Jeunesse on Blvd Mohammed V. Turban-wrapped hustlers
offer desert excursions, which we don’t recommend.
The town is disturbed once a week by day-trippers from Agadir, who descend for the
Saturday-morning souq, which includes a camel market. It’s a few kilometres from town on the
Tan Tan road.
A DESERT OF DREAMS & NIGHTMARES
The name is enough to make most of us dream. The Sahara, from the Arabic sahra (‘desert’) is the world’s largest arid zone.
It is also a place of nightmares, as only the well-attuned or well-prepared can survive in its 3 million sq miles of sand dunes,
parched mountains and rock-strewn plains.
The Romans never managed to cross the desert, preferring instead to patrol its northern borders – with good reason: lucky
travellers who survived the crossing described the trail of human and animal skeletons lining the Saharan caravan routes.
Late-18th- and early-19th-century European explorers struggled across the vast expanses, searching for answers to the
geographical riddles of the Niger River, the legendary town of Timbuktu and the gold fields of West Africa. They were
overwhelmed by the landscape as often as by raiders. The 18th-century British geographer James Rennell wrote in
Geographical Elucidations (published 1790): ‘Africa stands alone in a geographical view...its regions separated from each
other by the least practicable of all boundaries, arid Desarts [sic] of such formidable extent, as to threaten those who traverse
them, with the most horrible of all deaths, that arising from thirst!’
Even in the 20th century, the desert thwarted European colonisers and idle travellers, as Paul Bowles so elegantly captured
in his novel The Sheltering Sky, in which a group of wealthy Americans run into increasing trouble, the further they move into
the Sahara.
The dangers involved in Saharan travel give people who inhabit the wilderness a special place in society. Travel through
southern towns such as Essaouira and Goulimime, both of which have depended on the desert and its trade, and you will
meet some of them. Essaouira is musically linked to the Sahara by Gnaoua, developed by freed slaves from across the
desert; Click here.
No group is more closely associated with the desert than the Tuareg, to whom the so-called blue men, found in places such
as Goulimime, belong. Wrapped in their veils so only their eyes are exposed to the desert’s withering conditions, and bound by
strict tribal codes, they have long had a reputation for toughness and independence. The 14th-century Arab traveller Ibn Battuta
wrote of them, ‘They wear face-veils and there is little good to say about them. They are a rascally lot’. That opinion was
echoed over the following centuries by many who plied the Saharan caravan routes, whose goods or lives were taken by
Tuaregs. More recently, the Tuareg have battled in countries such as Mali and Niger for an independent homeland.
If the idea of survival in such an inhospitable place is part of what makes the Saharan dream so potent, so too is the
mysticism associated with deserts’ vast wastelands. Moses found guidance in a desert, Jesus went to the desert for 40 days
to prove himself, and early Christian hermits headed there to draw themselves closer to divinity. The Prophet Mohammad
brought his message of a new religion out of the desert. And in Morocco, many reformist movements came from the Sahara’s
fringes, most notably the zealous Almoravids and Almohads.