Marrakech to Fes 4 Day Desert Tour

Your 4 Day Desert Tour from Marrakech begins with the climb south through the High Atlas. We leave Marrakech in the morning and the road begins gaining altitude almost immediately. The Tizi n’Tichka Pass at 2,260 metres is the most dramatic stretch, a series of hairpin bends cut into the mountain face with views down into the valleys on either side. On a clear day the summit is one of the finest vantage points in North Africa.

We descend from the pass and reach Ait Ben Haddou in the late morning. The ksar is the finest surviving example of southern Moroccan earthen architecture, a fortified settlement of tiered kasbahs and towers built from local clay and straw. UNESCO has listed it as a World Heritage Site, and the film industry has used it as a backdrop for decades. We allow a proper 90 minutes here rather than a rushed visit. Walk up to the granary at the top of the ksar and look back across the Ounila River to understand the scale of the site from above.

After Ait Ben Haddou we continue to Ouarzazate, where we check in to the hotel with the afternoon free. Kasbah Taourirt is worth an hour on foot, and the Atlas Film Studios are a short drive if you want to see where Gladiator and Game of Thrones were built. Dinner and overnight in Ouarzazate.

After breakfast we leave Ouarzazate heading east on the Route of a Thousand Kasbahs, the pre-Saharan road that runs below the High Atlas through a corridor of fortified earthen towns. The road passes through the Skoura palm grove, one of the largest date palm oases in Morocco, where Kasbah Amridil stands among the trees and the old irrigation channels are still in use. We stop here for the walk through the palms.

The Rose Valley comes next, named for the Damascus rose plantations that cover the hillsides between Kelaat M’gouna and Boumaln Dades. In April and May the roses are in bloom and the distilleries are running; outside spring the valley still has the terraced gardens and the ancient kasbah walls that make it distinctive.

We arrive in the Dades Valley in the afternoon. The gorge is immediately accessible from the hotel and an hour’s walk up into the canyon before dinner is some of the most dramatic landscape on the whole route. The canyon walls rise on both sides and the rock formations above the guesthouse level are unlike anything in the south. Dinner and overnight.

We drive up into the Dades Gorge after breakfast while it is still cool and the canyon is quiet. The upper section above the guesthouse hotels is rarely visited by day-trip groups and the rock formations here, which include a series of folded layers resembling stacked fingers, are some of the most distinctive geology on the route. We come back down for breakfast and then continue east.

The Todra Gorge is an hour away. Where the Dades is wide and layered, Todra is narrow and vertical. The walls close to within 10 metres of each other and the river runs down the middle of the canyon floor. We walk the tightest section, where the walls rise 300 metres above and the light only reaches the bottom at midday. Arrive early and you have the canyon mostly to yourself before the organised tours fill it.

From Todra the desert begins properly. The vegetation drops away and by the time we reach the outskirts of Merzouga the road is running through flat hammada. The first sight of Erg Chebbi, the great sand mass of the Sahara, appears on the southern horizon long before we arrive. We reach the camp in the afternoon, in time to drop bags before the camel trek at sunset. An hour each way on camelback into the dunes. Dinner at the camp with the fire lit and the sky clear of any competing light. Overnight in a private tent.

We climb the nearest dune before sunrise. The Erg Chebbi dunes from above in the early light, with the shadow edges still sharp and the sky changing colour behind the Algerian mountains to the east, is the image most people take home from this tour. Breakfast at the camp, then the long drive north begins.

The Ziz Valley is the first stop. The road climbs above the valley floor and from the viewpoint the palm corridor stretches south as far as you can see, with old mud-brick ksour punctuating the line of green. We stop here before continuing into the Middle Atlas through Midelt, where lunch is taken in a local restaurant before the road enters the cedar forest above Azrou.

The forest is dense and the road winds through it for several kilometres. Barbary macaques live in the trees and move among the cars at the main stopping points. They are completely wild, not fed or kept. Ifrane follows: its tiled-roof chalets and stone lion sculpture are an odd sight after four days in the pre-Saharan south, but the protectorate-era architecture has its own logic once you know the history. The final stretch drops from the mountains into the Fes plain and we arrive in the late afternoon. We drop you at your riad or at the nearest accessible street if the medina roads are too narrow.