Anyone who pictures Libya as nothing but dunes and sand is in for a surprise with Jabal al Akhdar. In the far north-east of the country, this plateau almost 350 kilometres long gets enough Mediterranean rain —540 millimetres a year in Al Bayda, more than much of Spain— to support juniper and Atlas cedar forests, terraces of olive and almond trees, and upland villages where January can bring the odd frost. It is, quite literally, the 'Green Mountain': the only corner of Libya where the landscape looks more like Greece or southern Italy than the Sahara.
The region also packs in a particularly rich history: this is where Balagrae stood, the ancient classical city on which Al Bayda grew; this is where the Senussi movement had its base in the 19th century; and in these same mountains, between 1923 and 1931, Omar al-Mukhtar waged the longest guerrilla war against the Italian colonial occupation, using caves and gorges that can now be visited as part of Libya's historical memory. In 2011, Al Bayda was the first city to fall to the rebel forces that rose up against Gaddafi.
El-Kouf National Park, created in 1975, protects part of this wooded landscape, with wildlife including Barbary macaques, striped hyenas and, on the coast, dolphins and sea turtles. This page describes that natural and historical heritage in the detail it deserves, but without losing sight of the fact that Libya remains at level 4, «Do not travel», for the vast majority of the world's foreign ministries, and that Cyrenaica also requires a specific entry permit.
In classical antiquity the Jabal al Akhdar plateau was known as the setting of Balagrae, a settlement near Cyrene, and its altitude and wetter climate always made it the richest farming area in Cyrenaica, with terraces of olive, vine and almond that supplied the great coastal cities. In the 19th century the Senussi religious and political movement established a strong presence here, with Quranic schools (zawiyas) and a network of tribal influence that would prove decisive in 20th-century Libyan history. Under the Italian colonial occupation, these mountains were the stage for Omar al-Mukhtar's long guerrilla war (1923-1931), which used the rugged terrain and caves to hold out for almost a decade, until General Rodolfo Graziani forced the deportation of one hundred thousand inhabitants to coastal concentration camps and sealed the border with Egypt to isolate the fighters. Under the Kingdom of Libya there were plans, never carried out, to move the country's capital here; the city of Al Bayda then developed as an administrative and university centre, with the founding of Omar Al-Mukhtar University. In 2011, Al Bayda was the first Libyan city to fall to the forces that rose up against Muammar Gaddafi's regime.
Read the full history ↓Libya's Greek half: the Pentapolis founded by settlers from Thera, the cradle of the resistance against Italy and the country's greenest plateau, today also the centre of eastern Libya's rival administration.
Read the history of Cyrenaica and the green east →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Jabal al Akhdar —literally 'the Green Mountain'— is a stepped plateau of limestone and sandstone that runs parallel to the Mediterranean coast of north-eastern Libya for around 350 kilometres, reaching its highest point, about 850 metres, in the area known as Hamri. Its raised, sea-facing position makes it the only region of Libya where moist Mediterranean air masses are forced to rise and release rain on a regular basis.
The result is an exceptional climate for the country: in Al Bayda, the plateau's main city, average annual rainfall is around 540 millimetres, concentrated mostly between December and February, with months of up to 70 millimetres. Temperatures range from lows close to 1 °C in January —with occasional frost on the highest ground— to highs of about 38 °C in May. It is a Mediterranean-type regime (Köppen classification Csb), comparable to parts of southern Europe, something unheard of in a country where 90% of the territory is desert.
That combination of altitude and moisture supports vegetation found nowhere else in Libya: forests of Phoenician juniper (Juniperus phoenicea), relict stands of Atlas cedar (Cedrus atlantica) and an endemic species, the Libyan strawberry tree (Arbutus pavarii), which grows nowhere else in the world. The lower slopes are covered in farming terraces of olive, almond and vine, a dry-farmed Mediterranean landscape in stark contrast to the palm groves of the southern oases.
The plateau's agricultural wealth did not go unnoticed by the Greek settlers who founded Cyrene around 631 BC. In ancient times the settlement of Balagrae grew up near present-day Al Bayda, closely tied to the great city of Cyrene, just a few kilometres away on the same plateau. Plentiful water and farmland made this strip one of the most productive areas in all of classical Cyrenaica, complementing the trade and port activity of coastal cities such as Apollonia and Ptolemais.
Over the following centuries, under Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine rule, the plateau kept its role as a regional granary: its upland olive groves and vineyards supplied the five great cities of the Cyrenaican Pentapolis, while its forests provided timber, a scarce resource in the rest of arid North Africa.
With the Arab conquest of the 7th century, much of the region's classical urban infrastructure fell into decline, as happened across Cyrenaica, although the plateau's farming tradition survived through Berber and Arab communities who went on cultivating its terraces in the centuries that followed, sustaining a rural identity of their own until the arrival of Ottoman and, later, Italian colonial rule.
In the 19th century, Jabal al Akhdar became one of the main strongholds of the Senussi movement, the religious and political order founded by Muhammad ibn Ali as-Senussi, which set up Quranic schools (zawiyas) here devoted to the study of Islamic law and the settling of tribal disputes, and built a network of influence that would prove decisive in Libya's 20th-century political history, right up to the creation of the Kingdom of Libya under the Senussi dynasty in 1951.
That religious and organisational presence explains why, when Italy began colonising Libya in 1911, Jabal al Akhdar became the central stage of armed resistance. Omar al-Mukhtar, a Quran teacher and a figure linked to the Senussi movement, led a long-running guerrilla campaign against the colonial forces from 1923, using the plateau's rugged terrain —its gorges, caves and forests— to launch swift attacks on Italian outposts and then vanish into a landscape he knew better than anyone.
The Italian response, under General Rodolfo Graziani, was exceptionally brutal even by the colonial standards of the time: in 1930, some one hundred thousand inhabitants of Jabal al Akhdar were forcibly deported to concentration camps on the coast, and the border with Egypt was sealed with a barbed-wire fence more than 270 kilometres long to cut off weapons and shelter for the fighters. Omar al-Mukhtar was finally captured, wounded, near Slonta in September 1931, and publicly executed shortly afterwards in front of thousands of Libyan prisoners, an episode that made him Libya's national hero and a symbol of anti-colonial resistance across the Arab world.
Under the Kingdom of Libya (1951-1969), the modern city of Al Bayda —known during the colonial period as Beda Littoria— was developed according to a 1950s urban plan, on the site of ancient Balagrae. There was even a plan, eventually dropped, to move the kingdom's capital here, which gives a sense of the political and symbolic weight the region carried after independence. Instead, Al Bayda established itself as the administrative and university centre of the country's east, with the founding of Omar Al-Mukhtar University, the second university created in Libya, named directly in honour of the leader of the resistance against Italy.
In 1975, Muammar Gaddafi's government created El-Kouf National Park to protect the stretch of Mediterranean forest in Wadi al-Kuf, one of the country's few protected natural areas and a belated recognition of the plateau's unique ecological value.
Jabal al Akhdar returned to centre stage in Libyan history in February 2011: Al Bayda was the first city in the country to fall to the forces that rose up against Gaddafi's regime, in the so-called Battle of Bayda on 17 February that year, the episode that marked the start of the Libyan revolution and, with it, the cycle of civil war the country has been going through ever since.
El-Kouf National Park, created in 1975 around the Wadi al-Kuf canyon, stretches for about 20 kilometres along Libya's north-eastern coast and reaches more than 160 kilometres inland into Cyrenaica, following the bed of the wadi that gives it its name. It combines beaches, coastal dunes and lagoons with Mediterranean scrub, wooded hills, limestone cliffs and cave systems, one of the most diverse mosaics of habitats in all of North Africa.
Its vegetation includes Atlas cedar, Phoenician juniper, mastic and the endemic Libyan strawberry tree, while its wildlife includes Barbary macaque, striped hyena, golden jackal, red fox, wild boar, African wildcat and Cuvier's gazelle, along with a remarkable variety of birds —golden eagle, Egyptian vulture, storks, ducks and quails— and, along its protected coastline, bottlenose and common dolphins as well as loggerhead turtles that nest on some of the park's beaches.
The Wadi al-Kuf bridge, designed by Italian engineer Riccardo Morandi and built between 1965 and 1972 to link Al Marj and Al Bayda across the gorge, was for more than three decades the tallest cable-stayed bridge in the world, until France's Millau Viaduct overtook it in 2004; it remains one of the highest bridges in Africa and one of the country's most remarkable feats of engineering.
As with the rest of Libya's natural and cultural heritage, the park's current state of conservation, how effectively it is monitored and the condition of its wildlife cannot be fully verified given the instability the country has faced since 2011, although there are no records of direct combat damage in the Jabal al Akhdar area compared with other regions of the country.
