In a not-so-distant time, Dar Rana was at the end of a track, whether you came from the road to Fez or the road to Ouarzazate. 5 km separated it from tar, from civilization and… from cement. All the houses of the village were made of earth, without exception.
The owner who planted the olive trees on the present site more than 70 years ago made available to his landless neighbors a small space under the bend where they prepared and dried bricks of earth and straw. The clay found there was perfect for this purpose.
Today, there is not a single house nor long wall that is not built with cement. Faster and cheaper, allowing longer spans, it has won the game. It is the accession to modernity. In that regard, the traditional clay constructions, which was cheap because it was entirely made of a freely available material, has become today an adventure, and sometimes even a luxury.
In the village, which used to be all made of earth, this know-how is disappearing due to a lack of a traditional building site. And yet, to build the house and its outbuildings, 16,000 large-gauge (40 cm) mud bricks were prepared in the field below. It was a thin, small and dry almost sixty-year-old man who made them all over an entire year. A few young workers tried their hand at it, but no one except for him exceeded a week’s labor kneading earth and straw with his feet.
An illiterate mason, village shepherd in his childhood, assembled them with lime mortar, one by one, to a height of eight meters for the highest walls. It took almost two years of work for this earth-based masonry, which now must be protected from the rain by cornices.
Other craftsmen came to assemble the surrounding walls by the meter. The passage of the road, however, imposed a concession to concrete, whereas the initial wall was laid directly on the ground.
Today, “the artisanal house in the bend”, as the locals call it, is the rare representation of what will soon be a relic. Those who keep a house of earth feel poor compared to those who have built one in cement blocks.
However, all have kept the memory of the unequalled thermal comfort that their earth-based house brought. Today, when the douar suffocates under the extreme heat of July and August, they go out to sleep outside houses that are too hot in summer and too cold in winter.
