Sustainable Lalibela Project

About the Project

The Sustainable Lalibela Project is part of the Franco-Ethiopian cooperation program of restoration, preservation, and valorization of the site of Lalibela. Mainly funded by the French Development Agency (AFD) and carried out by the French Center for Ethiopian Studies (CFEE) and the French National Center for scientific research (CNRS). The project includes an intervention on-site and a training program for Ethiopian students, professionals and craftsmen to enhance capacity building in heritage management and conservation.

How to Use the Website

The Sustainable Lalibela Project website is designed as a trilingual platform (Amharic, French and English) accessible to a broad audience and for various uses. The website is intended to be scientific, interactive and playful. The website not only enables to discover the project, but also provides the resources to understand the site and the city of Lalibela: its history, its people, its urban organization, religious and cultural practices, scientific missions, etc. The website includes both textual and audiovisual resources, inspired by Social sciences methodology.

The project is in perpetual construction and it is this process that the website embodies. Each progress and steps of the project will be documented and published in this website: restoration works, research missions, capacity building activities and valorization. The project, alike the website, is addressed to the communities and is co-constructed with the Lalibela community. Researchers, university students, teachers and pupils will find resources for their scientific works, case studies or to feed their intellectual curiosity.