Family Adventure

Your driver meets you inside the terminal, which with luggage and tired children is worth more than it sounds. Fifteen minutes to the medina, then a short walk down the derb with a porter taking the bags.

Nothing is scheduled. Riads have courtyards and usually a plunge pool, and after a flight that is the correct use of the first afternoon. The staff are generally delighted by children and will feed them before you have unpacked.

If anyone still has energy in the evening, Jemaa el Fna is a fifteen minute walk and is at its best after dark, when the food stalls go up. Hold hands, agree a meeting point, and eat at a numbered stall.

A guided morning rather than a guided day, which for children is the right dose. The Koutoubia from outside, then into the souks through the dyers’ quarter, where the wool hangs dripping purple and yellow over the lane and nobody has to be told it is interesting.

The Bahia Palace next, which is a good building for children because it is all courtyards and ceilings rather than rooms with ropes across them. Our guides carry a few things to find along the way, which turns a palace into a search.

Afternoon free. Most families go back to the riad, swim, and go out again at five when the light softens. If anyone wants more, the Jardin Majorelle and its Berber Museum are twenty minutes away and have shade.

The cooking class is the centre of the day and it is genuinely hands on. You start at the market choosing vegetables and spices, then work in a riad kitchen with a dada, the professional home cooks of Morocco. Children get their own tasks, usually involving a lot of chopping and a tagine lid.

You eat what you made for lunch, in the courtyard, which takes a while and is meant to.

The afternoon is free and we suggest keeping it that way. Le Jardin Secret inside the medina is a good low effort option, with a tower you can climb for a view over the roofs. Or the pool, which is usually what wins.

A short drive south and the landscape changes completely. Within an hour you are climbing into the High Atlas through walnut groves and terraced fields, and by the time you reach Imlil at 1,740 metres the air is noticeably cooler and thinner.

The village is the trailhead for Jebel Toubkal, the highest mountain in North Africa, and it is a working place rather than a resort. Mules still do the carrying, the river runs through the middle of it, and there are more walnut trees than cars.

The afternoon is for settling in and a gentle walk up to Aroumd, the village above, which takes about forty minutes each way on a good path. Dinner is at the guesthouse, and it will involve more food than anyone can eat.

The main day of the mountain section, and the one most families remember. You walk out of Imlil with a local mountain guide and a muleteer, following the irrigation channels up through the walnut terraces towards the Aroumd plateau, with Toubkal standing at the head of the valley.

The mules come with you. Children ride when they are tired, which means the group can go further than the youngest pair of legs would otherwise allow, and the muleteer will usually have them leading the mule by lunchtime.

Lunch is in a village house with a Berber family, cooked that morning, eaten sitting on cushions round a low table. It lasts a long time and nobody minds. The walk back down is easier and shorter, and you are home by mid afternoon.

Back down out of the mountains and west across the plain to Agafay, a stone desert of rolling grey hills forty five minutes from Marrakech. It is not sand, and we say so clearly, but it is genuine desert with the High Atlas standing along the whole southern horizon.

You arrive early enough to use the afternoon properly. The camps have pools, and after two days of mountain walking that is exactly what is wanted. Camel riding is late afternoon, short and optional, and most people who swore they would not do it, do it.

After dinner the lights go down and the sky is the point. Agafay is far enough from the city for real stars and close enough that you are back in Marrakech in under an hour the next morning if anything goes wrong, which is why we use it rather than the Sahara on a family trip.

The longest drive of the journey, west across the plain towards the Atlantic. We break it at a women’s argan cooperative, where the nuts are still cracked by hand between two stones and the oil is pressed in front of you. Children can try the cracking, and generally cannot do it.

The landscape fills with argan trees as you get closer to the coast, and if you are lucky you will see goats standing in them, which is a real thing and not a tourist arrangement, though a few roadside spots do stage it for coins. Our drivers know the difference and will not stop at the staged ones.

Essaouira by mid afternoon. The temperature drops as you arrive, the wind picks up, and the whole feel of the trip changes. Walk out to the ramparts before dinner and watch the fishing fleet come in.

A short guided walk in the morning through a medina that is completely unlike Marrakech: laid out on a grid by a French architect in the 1760s, walled by the Portuguese before that, and small enough that children can be given a little freedom in it.

The port in the late morning, where the blue boats unload and the gulls make a scene, and the Skala ramparts with their row of Spanish cannon pointing out to sea. Orson Welles filmed Othello here and the town has never stopped mentioning it.

The afternoon is on the beach. It is a long flat sweep of sand with reliable wind, which makes it poor for swimming and excellent for kite flying, camel riding along the shore, and for older children a first windsurfing or surfing lesson, which we can arrange.

Essaouira has its own small airport with seasonal European flights, which saves you the drive back. If you are flying from Marrakech we leave after breakfast and the drive takes about three hours on a good road.

If your flight is late, there is time for a last hour on the beach or in the woodworkers’ souk under the ramparts, where they work thuya wood and the whole quarter smells of it.

If you would rather keep going, this journey extends easily: south down the coast, or back through Marrakech and on to the Sahara for families with older children. Tell us and we will cost it on your dates.