Festival au Désert

Festival au Desert, the Festival in the Desert, was a celebrated Tuareg music festival that grew from nomadic gatherings near Timbuktu into an internationally acclaimed event hosting Malian stars such as Ali Farka Toure and Tinariwen alongside international artists including Robert Plant. The festival was suspended after 2012 following the Tuareg rebellion and Islamist occupation of northern Mali, and its later editions have been staged in exile rather than at the original desert site.

Festival au Desert began as an extension of traditional Tuareg gatherings, the seasonal meetings nomadic communities in the Sahara have long held to combine trade, camel caravans, music and poetry, before organizers developed it into a structured public festival held in the dunes near Timbuktu.