Illizi Province
Illizi exhibits environmental archiving like rock art galleries: 15,000 Tassili n'Ajjer paintings record 12,000 years of Saharan climate change.
Illizi Province hosts Earth's largest open-air museum: the Tassili n'Ajjer, a 72,000 km² UNESCO World Heritage Site containing over 15,000 prehistoric rock engravings and paintings spanning 12,000 years. The name means "Plateau of Rivers" in Berber—a geological memory of when the Sahara was green. The art documents this climate transition: Archaic period hunters (10,000-7,500 BCE) pursued antelope and crocodile; the Pastoral era (4,500-4,000 BCE) shows cattle herds that could no longer survive today; the Camel period (1,000 BCE onward) marks the desert we now know.
The landscape itself is an archive. Water and wind erosion sculpted sandstone into a "forest of rock"—labyrinthine pinnacles, deep gorges, and over 300 natural arches creating what visitors describe as lunar terrain. The lost city of Sefar contains the densest concentration of rock art, with thousands of painted figures protected in shelters. This is path dependence at geological timescale: once the art was created on stable sandstone surfaces, it persisted through climate shifts that transformed everything else.
Access is strictly controlled—visitors must travel with official guides from Djanet or Illizi town. But even regulated tourism creates pressure: vandalism, litter, and erosion threaten sites that survived 10,000 years. The province demonstrates how environmental archives require active protection. What the ancient artists recorded—the transition from savanna to desert—now threatens to erase their record.