Sustainable Morocco

A full day in the medina with a guide on our day rate. The morning covers the Ben Youssef madrasa, the Saadian tombs and the Bahia palace, and the afternoon is the souks, which is where the day becomes different from everyone else s. You go to the dyers pit, the blacksmiths, the tanners and the weavers cooperative, rather than the four shops that pay guides a percentage.

Lunch is at a small place in the medina used by the people who work there. In the late afternoon we visit the Jardin Majorelle or, if you would rather, the Al Maaden and Comptoir des Mines galleries, which show contemporary Moroccan artists and cost a fraction of the entry.

If you want to buy a rug, this is the day. Your guide will translate, explain what you are looking at and then step out of the negotiation, because he has nothing riding on the outcome.

Ninety minutes south of Marrakech the plain ends and the High Atlas starts abruptly. The road climbs through Asni and its Saturday market into the Imlil valley, a corridor of walnut and cherry trees under Jebel Toubkal, at four thousand one hundred and sixty seven metres the highest peak in North Africa.

The last stretch to the lodge is thirty minutes on foot up a mule track, with your bags carried by mule, because no road goes there. The lodge is owned by a family from the village, runs on solar power, heats its water by solar and buys almost everything it serves from within the valley.

The afternoon is a short walk through the terraces above the village with a local guide, who will explain the irrigation system, a network of channels that has been shared by rota between families for six hundred years and is now under real strain from the drought.

A full day on foot with a mountain guide from the valley, walking between villages on the paths people actually use rather than a trekking circuit. The route crosses the Tizi n Tamatert or heads up towards Tizi Mzik depending on the weather, with views to the Toubkal summit and down over the whole Imlil valley.

Lunch is in a house in one of the villages, cooked by the family, which is the only kind of tourism money that reaches these hamlets at all. In spring the terraces are green with barley and the cherry trees are in blossom, and in autumn the walnut harvest is spread out on every flat roof.

Back at the lodge by late afternoon. Dinner is whatever the valley produced that week and you eat it with the family who cooked it, which is not a staged experience, it is simply how the house works.

Down out of Imlil and east along the northern edge of the Atlas through Demnate, then up a mountain road that climbs to nearly two thousand eight hundred metres before dropping into the Ait Bouguemez. The valley is fifteen kilometres long, flat bottomed, green with barley and walnut, and ringed by peaks. Locals call it the happy valley and the name is not a marketing invention.

Your guesthouse is a family house built in stone and rammed earth with a courtyard, terraces and rooms that are simple and spotless. Electricity came here in the 2000s and the road is still partly unsurfaced, so the valley receives a small fraction of the visitors the Toubkal side does.

The afternoon is a walk through the nearest villages with the owner s son, who will show you the collective granary at Sidi Moussa on its hill, a fortified store built in the twelfth century where forty families still keep grain.

A day on foot along the valley floor, which is flat and easy, visiting three or four of the villages strung along it. The architecture is unusual even for Morocco: flat roofed earth houses with hand painted wooden doors, built in terraces above the fields so that no house takes land that could grow barley.

Mid morning you spend an hour at a women s weaving cooperative where the members own the business, set the prices and keep the whole margin. You will see the natural dyes, the looms and the difference between a two week rug and a three month one. Nothing is expected of you and nobody on our side earns anything if you buy.

Lunch is with a family in a village house. The afternoon is free, and most people spend it on the guesthouse terrace with a book, because the valley is at nineteen hundred metres and the light in the late afternoon is remarkable.

A mountain road south across the Atlas and down the far side, where the vegetation thins and the rock turns red. You come out near Ouarzazate and continue to Skoura, a palm oasis of around thirty thousand trees with kasbahs hidden inside it, watered by a khettara system of underground channels that has run for centuries.

Your room is in a restored earth kasbah inside the grove, run by the family that rebuilt it. The garden grows most of what the kitchen serves, and the small pool is fed from the irrigation rota and drains back into the vegetable beds, which is how almost every pool in an oasis used to work.

Late afternoon is a walk through the palm grove to the Amerhidil kasbah, the largest in the south, and then nothing else. Dinner is in the garden.

A morning walk in the oasis before it warms, then west to Ait Ben Haddou, the fortified earth village on the Ounila that has been a UNESCO site since 1987. We climb through it with a guide from the village to the granary at the top and talk about what earth architecture actually costs to maintain, which is a more interesting conversation than the film credits.

Then over the Tizi n Tichka and down the northern slope into the Ourika valley, an hour from Marrakech but four hundred metres higher and several degrees cooler. Your house is a small guesthouse on the valley side, run by a family, with a terrace over the river and a fire in the evening.

This night is placed here on purpose. After a week of moving, a last evening in the mountains an hour from the airport is better than a last evening in the city.

Breakfast on the terrace and, if your flight allows, an hour walking up the valley to the first of the Setti Fatma waterfalls or through the Berber villages on the opposite bank. Then an hour down to Menara.

Before you go we send you a short written summary of where your money went: which families hosted you, which cooperatives you visited and what each guide was paid. Nobody asks us for it and we send it anyway, because a claim you cannot check is not worth making.