Nalut Amazigh Palace
The Amazigh Nalut Palace is a fortified granary dating back to the eleventh century AD or more and is located in the Nalut region in Libya.
Nalut Palace or Lalut Palace in the Old City of Nalut, Libya. It is one of the oldest “Amazigh palaces” in Libya and is located on the edge of Mount Nafusa, at an altitude of 640 meters above sea level. It also overlooks or monitors the main road linking Tripoli and Ghadames. There is no accurate recorded date for the establishment of the palace, but it is believed that the date of construction of a number of palaces scattered in the region dates back to the tenth or eleventh centuries AD.
Nalut Palace rises to six floors, inside which large numbers of warehouses were built that were used to store grains, grains, olive oil and goods, amounting to about 400 warehouses, as storage was the main reason for establishing the palace. The width of each warehouse does not exceed two and a half meters and a height of between 1 to 1.5 metres. The palace is distinguished by the fact that it does not have a large courtyard in the middle, but its construction was made of small stones, wood and gypsum.
The palace was subjected to artillery shelling by Turkish soldiers after the fall of the Karamanli dynasty in 1835, as its constructions weakened and its residents were forced to abandon it, to be restored by local residents in the nineteenth century at a later stage.
The palace has been abandoned since 1960.
In the 1980s, the people of the region and the Friends of the Environment and Heritage Society in Nalut, in cooperation with the Antiquities Authority, restored and cleaned it.
Source: websites