The Vertical Migration

The Numbers

The System

What is an agdal?

The word derives from the Amazigh root GDL — meaning simultaneously "to prohibit," "to protect," and "a territory." An agdal is all three at once. In the High Atlas, it refers to a communal highland pasture governed by seasonal closure: the tribal assembly (jmaâ) closes the mountain in spring, when plants are flowering and seeding. No herds enter. The vegetation completes its full reproductive cycle. Then the council reads the pasture — gauging whether the grass is mature enough — and declares the opening. Herds flood in. Animals eat. The land sustains.

This is not a folk practice. Research by the Global Diversity Foundation shows that biodiversity and vegetation cover — including endangered and endemic plant species — are measurably higher inside agdals than in adjacent areas without grazing prohibitions. The system maximises fodder production while sustaining the ecosystem. It is, by any ecological measure, a working technology. It has been working for at least 4,500 years, possibly longer. Agdals extend across the entire Maghreb, from southern Tunisia to the Western Sahara, from Mauritania to northern Algeria.

Many agdals are placed under the spiritual authority of a patron saint. The Yagour agdal belongs to Sidi Fares — the founding hero who, by legend, first entered the valley, demarcated pastures, and established the rules that govern social organisation. The agdal is sacred space: rituals are performed at the opening, during the stay, and at departure. Through belief and legend alone, the regulation holds. No fences. No written law. No police. The saint enforces. The community remembers.

The Vertical

Four bands, one mountain

Transhumance — from the Latin trans (across) and humus (earth) — is vertical migration. Each elevation band offers a different resource at a different season. The system exploits complementary levels of the mountain. Movement is the technology.

The Evidence

Carved in stone, 4,500 years ago

Oukaïmeden sits at 2,630 metres — higher than any other rock art site in North Africa. The valley could never be inhabited year-round: winter snow prevented occupation. But that same snow made it a strategic summer resource. When pastures dried out in the lowlands around Marrakech, herders brought their cattle up. They carved what they saw into red sandstone slabs. The earliest images — mid-3rd millennium BCE — are cattle. Detailed. Naturalistic. The animals that justified the climb.

Then the images change. From the 2nd millennium BCE onward, cattle give way to weapons: halberds, daggers, shields, warriors. Typologically, these weapons match real objects excavated from Early Bronze Age sites in southern Spain (El Argar, Carapatas) — evidence of trans-Mediterranean contact. But the message is local: the pastures are contested. What was once shared is now fought over. The right to graze at altitude became a right worth carving — and worth killing for.

At Yagour — 2,300 to 2,700 metres, 4,000 hectares, 2,000+ engravings — the largest single panel was called the "Sun Panel." It survived 3,500 years of weather, invasion, colonisation, and independence. In 2012, a group of Moroccan Salafists destroyed it, believing it depicted a sun god. What they destroyed was not an idol. It was a property deed — a 3,500-year-old record of who had the right to be here.

The Agdals

Six named commons

Timeline

4,500 years in 17 moments

The Collapse

Igourdane agdal, eastern High Atlas

Brahim Benyoussef is 80 years old. He has walked the same 200-kilometre path every summer of his life — from Nkob in the Anti-Atlas to the Igourdane agdal in the High Atlas. His family's herd is 1,100 strong. He is up before dawn because he never slept — he was watching the animals through the night. Newborn lambs too young to walk are bundled onto donkeys and reunited with their mothers at dusk.

In the 1970s, government and development NGOs pushed Amazigh farmers to replace traditional rain-fed cereals with commercial fruit trees. Without cereals, there was no fodder. Without fodder, herds shrank. Without large herds, the 200-kilometre trek became unnecessary. The seasonal festivals emptied. The young left for cities. The fruit trees needed fertiliser and pesticide in droughting soil. The thing that was supposed to replace transhumance is now itself failing.

The agdal works. The biodiversity data proves it. The vegetation recovers. The endemic species survive inside the agdal and vanish outside it. It is not the system that is failing. It is the people who are leaving.

Sources & Attribution