Dancalia is a desert of salt and lava. We are in oriental Africa, in Ethiopia. This is a fragile earth. The Dancalia is daughter of a geologic cataclysm where you can seen the Earth pulsate to create a great beauty. In this desert of lava and salt practically never rains; the temperature in the summer it reaches the limits of the human patience (50 degrees, but with points record up to 81), and only drinkable water originates from deep wells, because the lakes are all salty or brackish ones. The afar (or dàncali) Live solitary villages formed from family huts, builded with mats of leaves of palm and with the roof domed. They practise a circular nomadism, they follow the development of the rains and the brief fertility of the pastures. One of the points more heats and lower part of the earth is the volcanic crater of Dallol, (-116 meters), a mineral universe of rising geyseriane that produces stupendous little ponds with unbelievable concretions and crystals of chlorides of potassium, sodium and magnesium, psychedelic colored, in an intense effluvium of sulphur. The volcano has also built an expanse of steeples with different forms and dimensions and with intense colors, almost to form a ghost and fantastic city of rock. The adjoining Plain of the Salt is an immense long salty lowland 200 km, an arid and red-hot desert of salgemma where the afar and tigrini extract blocks of salt that they transport on the Ethiopian highland with caravans composed of two thousand dromedaries for a long time. Finally the nighttime vision of the incandescent and continuous lava of the Erta Ale volcano , constitutes an unique and extraordinary spectacle.
