Ait Ben Haddou: Visiting tips, architecture and history of the UNESCO World Heritage Site

How does building with clay work?

As there are no forests in this region, people have learned to make use of the build­ing mate­ri­als avail­able: Clay and palm wood.

These mate­ri­als can be found in abun­dance around the village and the clay from the nearby river gives the walls their char­ac­ter­is­tic red tone.

Thanks to the natural build­ing mate­ri­als, the village blends harmo­niously into its surround­ings. At first glance, you could easily over­look the houses as they blend in with the color of the surroundings. 

Clay as a building material for walls

The village’s build­ings are constructed from molded, sun-dried clay bricks — a tech­nique known as adobe, which differs from the rammed earth tech­nique(pisé) used in the famous red city walls of Marrakesh, for example.

The houses are plas­tered with clay on both the outside and inside, which gives them their homo­ge­neous appear­ance. Some houses have a plinth made of field­stones, which is partially visible. 

Clay is plen­ti­ful, cheap and can be worked with­out machines. The houses, which are built from dried clay bricks, keep cool in summer and warm in winter. 

Because the build­ing mate­r­ial is not very stable, thick walls are needed to support the tall build­ings. The build­ings lean against each other and support each other and it is not uncom­mon for the houses to be liter­ally nested inside each other. 

Palm wood and reed stalks provide the material for ceilings and roofs

The date palms that grow along the river bear little fruit due to the alti­tude, but are used as build­ing material. 

The trunks are used to make ceil­ing beams and the fibers are used to make mats and ropes. The palm fronds are used to make baskets and other utensils. 

Reeds are also processed into mats and used as build­ing mate­r­ial for ceil­ings and roofs.

For ceil­ings, palm wood beams are laid first, covered with reed mats and then sealed with a mixture of clay and straw

Doors and windows are made of wood. Glass was tradi­tion­ally not used, and some­times ornate metal gridswere placed in the window openings. 

This econom­i­cal and sustain­able construc­tion method also poses a prob­lem with regard to the not very frequent, but often torren­tial rain­fall: as the bricks are not burnt, there is a risk that the build­ings will simply dissolve with every down­pour. The scorch­ing summer heat also affects the old walls, which virtu­ally crum­ble under the Moroc­can sun. 

Even today, the settle­ment is exten­sively restored every three years, as the sun and occa­sional rain cause the walls to crum­ble. This construc­tion method requires constant repair work, which is tradi­tion­ally carried out by the village commu­nity, but is diffi­cult nowa­days as hardly anyone still lives in the old village. 

This also creates a diffi­cult para­dox for Aït Ben Haddou: the masses of visi­tors cause the frag­ile struc­tures to suffer, but the village needs enough paying visi­tors to main­tain them and the inter­est of the tourists ensures that the main­te­nance of the build­ings is worthwhile.