Tamegroute

Tamegroute is a small ksar in the lower Drâa Valley about twenty kilometres south of Zagora, built around the Zawiya Nasiriyya — a Sufi religious foundation established by Sidi Mohammed Ben Nasir in the seventeenth century. The zawiya was for several centuries the most influential religious centre of southern Morocco, intervening in the politics of the southern oases and acting as a node of trans-Saharan exchange.

The settlement combines the standard pisé-and-adobe ksar fabric with a more substantial enclosed religious complex containing a mosque, a Quranic school, and the famous zawiya library, which holds an internationally significant collection of medieval Arabic manuscripts on jurisprudence, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine. The library is open to scholarly visitors and is one of the few continuously functioning manuscript libraries in southern Morocco.

Tamegroute is also known for a distinctive green-glazed pottery tradition, produced in family workshops on the village outskirts using local clay and a copper-rich glaze fired in wood kilns; the technique is unrelated to the pisé construction tradition but coexists in the same village economy. The fabric of the ksar is in mixed condition — the central religious complex is maintained by the zawiya as a living institution, while the residential quarters around it show the typical pattern of selective abandonment and slow earthen decay.