Luxury Hotels Atlas / Places / Algeria / Timimoun / Hotel Gourara
Hotel Gourara
Timimoun, Algeria · Independent · Near Luxury
Fernand Pouillon built Hotel Gourara between 1968 and 1970 as a horseshoe of local red clay, neo-Sudanese in silhouette, cascading down a cliff above Timimoun, the Red Oasis. Terraces and a central pool frame sunsets over the Sebkha salt lake. The 60-room house remains a jewel of Algeria's Saharan hotel heritage: rooms fan outward on four levels so every terrace looks at dunes and the palm grove below.
- 60 rooms
- Opened 1970
- Architect: Fernand Pouillon
About Hotel Gourara
- Pouillon hid the hotel's true volume from the street: the building only reveals itself as stacked terraces once you look from the palm grove, a 10-metre drop down the plateau.
- Load-bearing walls mix shuttered concrete with toub (sun-dried clay and straw). The lobby is a columned hall of groin vaults with toub ribs, plastered the ochre-red of Timimoun's earth.
- The horseshoe plan was designed so rooms open onto the Grand Erg Occidental and the sebkha, rather than toward the town.
History
Hotel Gourara was designed by Fernand Pouillon in 1968 and completed around 1970 for Algeria's Ministry of Tourism, one of three Saharan hotels he built in the same campaign (with Rustumide at Ghardaia and Mehri at Ouargla). It sits in a horseshoe on a ridge above Timimoun's palm grove in the Grand Erg Occidental, finished in the red clay of the surrounding ksour.
Open Hotel Gourara in the atlas for live weekend rates, photos, and the full folio.