The tiny town of Haid Al-Jazil was built on a rock and looks like a fantastic film scene!
If you love incongrus villages, if you like to feel like transported to another world, if you want to live in a fantastic landscape, just out of the imagination of a science fiction author, then the village of Haid Al-Jazil is the place you have to go.
Photo credit: Sergej Esnault
Earth construction
Located in Yemen, this completely unreal village is perched on a rock block in balance over 150 metres above the Wadi Hadramaout valley. It is mainly made up of mud brick houses that confuse the dwellings in the natural setting. The houses then become almost invisible.
The valley, certainly made up of oasis and magnificent palm groves, is above all a succession of desert plateaus that are cut off by cliffs of a prodigious verticality, as if Mother Nature wished to preserve this place of external intrusions.
But the inhabitants were able to reuse and to benefit from this unusual landscape, they erected their houses with basic material, mud and dried brick. It is important to know that the dried brick resists almost 250 years in the sun without ever fading or deepening.
Photo credit: Tsiklonaut
As the wood is too rare in this region, the brick is prepared from dried clay and is then mixed with corn straw. The paste obtained is trampled by animals or petrie by the inhabitants and finally molded in wood forms. After a few hours, the bricks obtained are sufficiently resistant for the construction of houses and other buildings.
Solution the lack of water
It is worth not only the detour for the landscapes surrounding it, for its surrounding deserts and mountainous heights, but what is so singular in Haid Al-Jazil is that there is no water point: no lake, no river.
This specificity of Haid Al-Jazil has pushed part of the local population to find tips about their places of residence: they have decided to build them up in height in these seasonal river valleys, they are called "wadis".
Photo credit: Flickr – فهد باوجيه
In Yemen, the problem of water shortages is very serious and it is a reality with which people must cope every day. The construction in height of these houses so atypical and especially their raw material that is mud allows to capture the rain water and to take advantage of other reserves.
But the problem of water has become a subject of recurring crisis: the various wars and social crises have exacerbated this problem and today Yemen is one of the 10 countries in the world the poorest in water.
An alarming situation that calls for constant adaptation and every moment on the part of local populations such as Haid Al-Jazil. It is surely one of these millennial villages that has managed to preserve its heritage and transmit it to the following generations with incredible know-how and sense of aesthetics.
Unfortunately, the current security environment makes it impossible to travel to Yemen. To discover these decors worthy of the Lord of the Rings, you will have to wait... but until when?
Main photo credit: Ralph Roberts
Loading comments ...