Ghadames is a pre-Saharan oasis in westernmost Libya, at the meeting point of the Libyan, Algerian, and Tunisian borders. The town sits in a depression around an artesian spring, the Ain al-Faras, that for at least two millennia has watered its palm and citrus gardens.
The oasis was the Roman fort of Cydamus from the first century CE; under Arab geographers it appears as a key node on the trans-Saharan route between Tripoli and the Niger bend. Its prosperity rested on the trade in gold, slaves, and ivory from the Sahel and on salt and dates moving south.
The traditional Berber-speaking population of Ghadames speak Ghadamsi, an eastern Tamazight variety classified within the Zenati branch and now estimated at fewer than ten thousand speakers, increasingly bilingual in Arabic.
The old town is celebrated for an architecture of high whitewashed earthen walls and palm-roofed alleys covered against the desert sun, with rooftop terraces reserved for women and a labyrinthine ground-level circulation reserved for men. UNESCO inscribed the historic centre as a World Heritage Site in 1986. Most residents were resettled in modern housing in the 1980s and the old quarter is now occupied seasonally; armed conflict in Libya from 2011 onward has interrupted both conservation and tourism.