The walk is quiet and peaceful, in the shade of the trees and along the small irrigation canals. We meet a few phoeniculturalists (we signed a partnership with Larousse to make you buy dictionaries) who greet us warmly or stop to say two words. You just need to wear closed shoes, because the ground is strewn with palms, worse than a late evening at the Cannes festival.
Too bad we are not in autumn, the harvest season, to taste the fresh fruit. We will have to go back to another date.
Up the date palms, then the fruit trees, on the ground the vegetables. On the outskirts of the city we pass a monumental brick door with wooden doors studded with Berber motifs. The rich houses hide in the gardens. Some belong to Europeans. At a crossroads stands the statue of Ibn Shabat (1221-1285) who planned the irrigation system of the palm grove: hourly distribution of water. Mohamed shows us the fruit trees: pear, fig, apricot, pomegranate trees whose leaves have turned yellow. A peach tree has kept its green leaves and the jujube tree.
Even today, irrigated by two hundred springs united in a central watercourse and redistributed by a tight network of dams and canals, it is one of the most famous oases in the world. It shelters a splendid palm grove of more than 1000 hectares planted with 400,000 trees.
Seen in the hot day, a walk in these canals is an amazing sensation which difficult to describe it..
