Marrakech and the Sahara

Your driver meets you inside the terminal, not at the kerb, and the transfer into the medina takes about fifteen minutes. Cars cannot reach most riads, so the last two hundred metres are on foot through the derb with a porter for the bags. It is the correct introduction to a city that is built around that fact.

The rest of the day is yours. If you land early there is time for mint tea on the roof and an hour of getting lost deliberately, which is the only way the medina ever starts making sense. If you land late, go straight out to Jemaa el Fna after dark, when the food stalls are up and the square is doing what it has done since the eleventh century.

We do not schedule anything on arrival day. Flights slip, and the first evening is better spent adjusting than performing.

A full day with a private local guide, starting early while the souks are still being opened and the light is coming down into the alleys at an angle. We begin at the Koutoubia, whose minaret set the proportions for the Giralda in Seville and the Hassan Tower in Rabat, then go into the covered souks by the dyers’ quarter rather than the tourist entrance.

The Bahia Palace in the late morning, built in the 1860s by a grand vizier who had been a slave, and then the Saadian Tombs, which were sealed up in 1603 and not reopened until an aerial survey found them in 1917. In the afternoon, Le Jardin Secret or the Majorelle and the Berber Museum, depending on how much walking you want and how hot it is.

We leave the end of the day open on purpose. Most people want a hammam by then, and the good ones need booking the same morning once we know how you are feeling.

We leave after breakfast and climb the Tizi n’Tichka, the pass that crosses the High Atlas at 2,260 metres. The road was rebuilt and widened over the last few years, which has taken an hour off this leg and most of the drama out of it. There are two or three places worth stopping on the way up, and your driver knows which of them are viewpoints and which are shops pretending to be viewpoints.

Aït Benhaddou in the afternoon. The ksar is a UNESCO site and the most filmed building in Morocco, and in the middle of the day it is busy. By four o’clock the coaches have gone and you can cross the river, walk up through the earthen houses and climb to the agadir on the summit with the valley opening out below. Eight families still live inside the walls.

Then Ouarzazate, and south through Agdz into the Draa. The valley starts suddenly, a green line in a brown country, and you follow it with the palms on one side and the escarpment on the other until Zagora. You arrive in the early evening with enough light to see where you are.

A short morning along the last of the Draa to M’Hamid, which is where the tarmac ends and Morocco runs out of road. From there it is open desert, about two hours of hamada and dry riverbed with your driver navigating by landform. You pass the odd nomad camp and a well or two and then the dunes come up on the horizon like weather.

Erg Chegaga is roughly forty kilometres long and up to three hundred metres high in places, and because there is no road to it there are no day visitors. You arrive at the camp in the afternoon, which leaves time to do nothing for an hour before the heat goes out of the day.

At about an hour before sunset you go out on camels into the dunes to a high crest, and the guide brings tea. The sun goes down fast at this latitude. Dinner is back at the camp, and afterwards the generator goes off and the sky does the thing that everybody comes here for.

This is the day that makes the journey worth eight days instead of four. Nothing is compulsory. Most people start before sunrise, walking twenty minutes up the nearest high dune in the cold to watch the light arrive, then come back down for breakfast as the camp wakes up.

Through the morning we take you out to a nomad family who still move with their herds in this area, which is a genuine visit rather than a staged one, and then on to the edge of Lake Iriqui, a dry lake bed that fills only in exceptional years and held water again in 2024 for the first time in half a century. Sandboarding in the afternoon if you want it, and a long lunch and a sleep if you do not.

In the late afternoon there is a second camel ride for those who want one, or a walk out into the erg on foot, which is better for photographs. The second night in the desert is always more relaxed than the first, because by then you have stopped checking your phone for a signal that is not coming.

Out across the hamada in the early morning while it is still cool, back to the tarmac at M’Hamid, and then north up the Draa by the same valley you came down, which looks entirely different going the other way with the light on the other side of the palms.

We stop at Tamegroute, where there is a Koranic library holding manuscripts from the eleventh century and a pottery quarter working in a green glaze made with manganese that is found nowhere else in Morocco. The kilns are underground and still fired with palm fronds.

Ouarzazate in the late afternoon. If the Atlas Studios appeal you can visit them, or the Taourirt Kasbah in the centre of town, which was the Glaoui stronghold and is the better building of the two. A proper shower and a bed after two nights under canvas is not to be underestimated.

A relaxed start. The drive back crosses the Tichka again, and because you are going north the views open the other way, down over the Haouz plain towards Marrakech with the mountains behind you.

If you want one more stop, the old Telouet Kasbah is a half hour detour off the pass and almost nobody goes there. It was the seat of the Glaoui family who effectively ran southern Morocco until 1956, and it is half ruined and completely unrestored, with two or three rooms of extraordinary painted cedar and zellige still intact under a collapsing roof.

You are back in Marrakech by mid afternoon, which leaves the evening free for whatever you did not get to on day two. Most people use it for the souks, now that they know their way around.

Breakfast on the roof and a transfer timed to your flight. The airport is close and the formalities are usually quick, but we build in a margin because the queues at Menara are unpredictable in high season.

If you have a late flight, we can hold a day room at the riad or arrange a last morning with your guide, in the Mellah and the spice souk, or at the tanneries, which almost nobody sees in Marrakech because everybody is told to see them in Fes.

If you would rather carry on than go home, this itinerary joins naturally to Essaouira on the coast, which is three hours west, or to the Dades and Todra gorges if you want more mountains.