3 Day Tour from Marrakech to Merzouga

Your 3 day Marrakech to Merzouga desert tour begins with a drive south into the High Atlas, the mountain range that separates the Atlantic climate of Marrakech from the pre-Saharan south. We leave in the morning and the first major landmark is the Tizi n’Tichka Pass, the highest paved mountain road in Morocco at 2,260 metres. The descent on the other side brings a complete change of colour: from green mountain valleys to the terracotta tones of the kasbah corridor.

We arrive at Ait Ben Haddou before the afternoon crowds. The UNESCO-listed ksar is one of the best-preserved earthen architecture sites in the world, a stacked cluster of kasbahs, granaries, and mosque towers built from the same red clay as the hillside it sits on. The fortified village has appeared in more than a dozen major productions, from Gladiator and Game of Thrones to Babel. We allow a full 90 minutes here to walk it properly.

After Ait Ben Haddou we stop briefly in Ouarzazate at the Atlas Film Studios if you want to see where the sets were built. We then head east through the Skoura palm grove and the Rose Valley before arriving in the Dades Valley as the light starts to fall. Dinner and overnight in the gorge.

After breakfast we head into the Dades Gorge before the day trips arrive. The canyon is dramatic in the morning light, with the walls catching the early sun at angles that disappear by midday. We drive the gorge road as far as the time allows, then return to the main road and head east toward Tinghir.

The Todra Gorge is narrower and steeper than the Dades. At its tightest point the walls are 300 metres high and only 10 metres apart. We walk the floor of the canyon with the river running alongside, an entirely different Morocco from the mountain pass of yesterday and the desert that is coming this afternoon. The scale of the rock faces takes a moment to register.

Beyond Tinghir the road flattens and the desert begins in earnest. The air dries out, the road straightens, and eventually the great sand mass of Erg Chebbi appears on the southern horizon. We reach Merzouga in the afternoon. There is time to drop bags at the camp before the camel trek begins at sunset.

We ride out into the dunes on camelback, a 1-hour journey through the dunes. The camp is set back in the dunes and the sky above it, once the sun has gone down, is completely clear. Gnawa music around the fire. Then sleep in a private tent while the desert settles into silence around you.

You are up before the sun. A short walk up the nearest dune gives you the sunrise over the Erg Chebbi dunes, the sky going from black to purple to orange in the space of twenty minutes. Breakfast at the camp before we load the vehicle and head west.

The return to Marrakech follows the Draa Valley, a completely different road from the outward journey. The Draa is Morocco’s longest river and the oasis corridor it creates stretches for over 200 km, lined with date palms, old kasbah ruins, and fortified granaries built against floods and raids that no longer come. The landscape is soft and green in a way that makes no sense this close to the Sahara until you understand what the river does to the land on either side of it.

We stop in the Draa Valley towns, pass through Agdz, and rejoin the main road at Ouarzazate. From there it is the familiar climb back through the Atlas and over the Tizi n’Tichka before descending into Marrakech from the south. We arrive in the early evening and drop you at your riad. The same city you left two days ago, except that the Sahara was somewhere between.