M'Sila Province
The Hodna basin: from -5°C to 46°C, 69-200mm annual rain. Nomads settled, jessour water walls crumbled, 50,000 hectares of rangeland turned to bare soil since 1984.
M'Sila occupies the Hodna basin—a vast steppe depression where temperature swings from -5°C to 46°C and rainfall averages 69-200mm annually. This is transition territory: Tell Atlas to the north, Sahara to the south, Chott el-Hodna (a salt lake) at its heart. Extreme conditions created extreme adaptations.
Formerly all Hodna inhabitants were nomads. They built jessour—water retention walls constructed parallel to contours, designed to slow snowmelt and distribute water during dry months. Most of these traditional engineering works are now ruins. In the 20th century, M'Sila became Algeria's first sedentarization experiment: government-built villages intended to settle nomadic populations using local materials. The nomads stayed, but the landscape didn't cooperate. Between 1984 and 2014, rangelands shrank by 50,000 hectares while bare soil expanded by 57,000.
The history runs deeper than pastoralism. The Fatimids founded M'Sila city in the 10th century, recycling stone from Roman ruins at Lambaesis or Timgad. Nearby, the Beni Hammad Fort (1007-1090) contains Algeria's second-largest historic mosque—now a UNESCO World Heritage site. The fort's 7km walls enclose a ghost city abandoned after 83 years. M'Sila's story is adaptation under pressure: nomads becoming farmers, forts becoming ruins, rangelands becoming desert.