Atlas Mountains & the Maghreb Nature Nonprofits

The Atlas ranges run through Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia and separate the Mediterranean north of Africa from the Sahara behind it, catching what rain there is and holding the snow that feeds the rivers and the oases. They rise high enough for genuine winter, and the cedar forests of the Middle Atlas are the last refuge of the Barbary macaque, the only monkey in Africa north of the Sahara and the only wild monkey in Europe, on Gibraltar, by way of these mountains.

Water is the whole question. The oases of the pre-Saharan valleys are irrigated by khettara, ancient underground channels that carry groundwater by gravity for kilometres, an engineering tradition of great sophistication that is falling out of use as boreholes draw the water table down faster than it can recharge.

The organizations here protect the Atlas cedar and the macaque, defend the oases and the traditional water systems that sustain them, and work in a region where drought is deepening and the desert margin is moving north.