Old Town of Ghadamès

They call Ghadamès the pearl of the desert: a whitewashed oasis town on Libya's edge of the Sahara whose ingenious architecture beats the heat. Houses divide life vertically — storage below, family rooms above, and rooftop terraces where women moved and socialised across the skyline — while covered alleys underneath form a shaded, almost subterranean street network. One of the oldest pre-Saharan settlements, it was inscribed by UNESCO in 1986 as a masterpiece of desert urbanism.