INSEDIAMENTO STORICO E AGRO PRODUTTIVO NEL CANYON DI GHOUFY IN ALGERIA

The historical installation of the canyon of Ghoufy, in the southern Algeria, it represents an extraordinary sustainable system of the spaces of the habitat through the integrated management of the resource water according to practical community that have built a topography of the habitat and productive constituted by cultivated balconies and garrisoned by a complex net of villages. The structure of this installation, that unties him for around 60 kilometers along the course of the Oued Abiod - an important character torrential river that carries the winter waters of the last layers of the atlas in the region des Aures toward the Sahara - is articulated by the villages to protect the line of water and the linear system of palm groves and gardens that ensure the subsistence of it in the winter season. A complex social structure linking the communities of the different villages and a system of individual property management, of the village community and of the whole settlement system, regulates the equilibrium of a region in which the seasonal rhythms of the pastures are combined with the transhumance linked to the pasture. cereal crops conducted in the surrounding mountain lands, alternating their presence between the mountain and the canyon bottom, and generating a network of special collective structures including granaries and oil mills linked to fortified storage and processing of agricultural products. The settlement structure, entirely regulated by the water with capture and collection systems, accumulation, distribution and capillary distribution that allow feeding the terraces on the river edge, according to a centuries-old process of contention of the vital space for agricultural activities to the river itself , is characterized by an exceptional relationship between man and territory and constitutes a significant case of cultural, material and immaterial heritage, at great risk of abandonment.