Читать книгу Mountaineering in the Moroccan High Atlas. Walks, climbs & scrambles over 3000M онлайн

12 страница из 47

European Exploration

The Atlas mountains have been inhabited for thousands of years. Indeed, some rock carvings and engravings could suggest that they have been lived in for some 12,000 years, but exploration by European visitors has taken place only in the past century.

The early explorers in the late 1800s were primarily British. The British botanist and director of the Royal Kew Gardens, Sir Joseph Hooker, and his two companions, Ball and Maw, toured around the Atlas and were the first Europeans to visit the village of Aremd below Toubkal. They were also the first Europeans to climb a 3000m peak – Jbel Gourza, just north of the old TinMal mosque on the Tizi n-Test road. However, when they climbed up to Tizi n-Tagharat (north-east of Jbel Toubkal), they were unable to establish which was the highest point in the Atlas – rather ironic, as they were not too far from Toubkal on this col.

The Scottish explorer Joseph Thomson was in the country in 1889, and, continuing the Scottish theme, RB Cunninghame Graham, a politician-cum-adventurer, travelled and trekked around the southern Atlas region in the 1890s, getting close to Taroudant in disguise before he was discovered and returned to Essaouira on the coast. (At that time, Taroudant was a city forbidden to outsiders.)