Jabal al Akhdar District
Libya's 600mm rainfall anomaly created a forested mountain where Greeks built Cyrene—now the country's last agricultural zone, losing endemic species as climate shifts.
Jabal al Akhdar—the Green Mountain—exists because Mediterranean weather systems hit a 900-meter limestone escarpment and drop their rain. In a country that is 95% desert, this 330-kilometer stretch of forested upland receives 600mm of precipitation annually, creating an oasis of pine, juniper, and wild olive unique in North Africa.
The Greeks recognized this anomaly immediately. Cyrene, founded in 631 BCE on the mountain's northern slope, became one of antiquity's wealthiest cities—exporting the silphium plant (a contraceptive so valuable Rome put it on coins) alongside grain, horses, and olive oil. The Pentapolis of Greek Libya clustered here because nowhere else could sustain them. When silphium went extinct from overharvesting around the 1st century CE, the region's prosperity declined but never disappeared.
Today, the Green Mountain remains Libya's agricultural heartland. Fruit orchards, potato farms, and olive groves occupy the terraced slopes. More than half of Libya's endemic plant species grow only here: Arbutus pavarii, Cyclamen rohlfsianum, seven species found nowhere else on Earth. The forests that gave this region its name—among the few in the world's least-forested country—face pressure from overgrazing and climate change.
The district's scattered population farms the same terraces their ancestors carved. Pastoralists still practice transhumance, moving livestock between summer and winter pastures as they have for millennia. Towns like Bayda and Shahat (ancient Cyrene) preserve Greek and Roman ruins beneath modern buildings.
By 2026, the Green Mountain faces a biological reckoning: rainfall declining, aquifers depleting, endemic species disappearing. Libya's only sustainable agricultural zone may not survive the century that broke its dams and fractured its government.