Travel Guide Bou Saada

Not yet fully Saharan and still belonging to the High Plateaux, Bou-Saada is a pretty and clean city, the oasis "of happiness" as its name suggests and as affirmed by those who discovered it in the nineteenth century, such as the painters Guillaumet (buried in the Montmartre cemetery) or Etienne Dinet, an orientalist painter who chose to live and die there (in 1929), as much inspired by the city as by the sensuality of the Ouled Naïl, dancers who were then very much in fashion."Bou-Saada, the tawny queen dressed in her dark gardens and guarded by her purple hills, sleeps, voluptuous, on the steep edge of the wadi where the water rustles on the white and pink pebbles. Leaning as if in a dreamy nonchalance on the small earthy walls, the almond trees cry their white tears under the caress of the wind... Their sweet perfume hovers in the soft tepidness of the air, evoking a charming melancholy... " Isabelle Eberhardt, Pleurs d'amandiers (1903).