Somba Country (Tata-Somba Houses)

Around Boukoumbé and the village of Koussoucoingou in Benin's Atacora department, the Batammariba — also called Somba or Tammari — build distinctive fortified mud-tower dwellings known as tata-somba. The two-storey houses keep livestock and cooking below and have a flat rooftop terrace with granaries, developed with defensive features during the era of slave raids. The same culture straddles the border with Togo, where the wider Koutammakou landscape was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2004 (reference 1140). The Benin villages lie in the hills of the Atacora, roughly twenty kilometres from the Togolese border.

Sources: [1] · [2]