Morocco Travel Guides
The places our tours actually stop — kasbahs, mountain passes, desert camps, and medinas — with the real, practical detail behind each one.
All travel guides
Merzouga
Merzouga is a small town on the edge of the Sahara, and it's where every Through Morocco desert tour ends up for the night — you trade the vehicle for a camel here and ride into the dunes for a camp under the stars. It sits right beside Erg Chebbi, one of Morocco's two great sand-sea dune fields, with dunes that reach over 150 meters in places.
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Sahara Desert
When people say they want to "see the Sahara" on a Morocco trip, they usually mean Erg Chebbi, the dune field near Merzouga on the desert's northwestern edge — reachable from Marrakech or Fes by a full day of driving through the Atlas mountains. The Sahara itself stretches across much of North Africa; this is the accessible, well-established corner of it that Moroccan desert tours actually visit.
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Ait Ben Haddou
Ait Ben Haddou is a fortified ksar (a cluster of earthen kasbahs behind a shared defensive wall) on the old caravan route between the Sahara and Marrakech, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987. It's a stop on every one of our Marrakech–Merzouga desert routes.
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Ouarzazate
Ouarzazate is a town on the southern side of the High Atlas, known locally as "the Hollywood of Morocco" for the film studios on its outskirts. It's a stop or overnight point on our Marrakech–Merzouga desert routes, and a practical hub for this part of the country — a real town with real infrastructure, not just a tourist stop.
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Dades Gorge
The Dades Gorge is a canyon in the Atlas mountains, part of the wider Dades Valley, known for a switchback road that climbs the canyon wall in a series of tight turns and for the dramatic, eroded rock formations along the valley floor. It's on the route between Merzouga and Ouarzazate on our desert tours.
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Chefchaouen
Chefchaouen is a town in the Rif mountains known for the blue-painted lanes of its medina — one of the most photographed streets in the country. It's reachable as a day trip from Tangier or Fes, or as a stop on our longer loops through the north.
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Essaouira
Essaouira is a walled port town on Morocco's Atlantic coast, and a coastal stop on several of our Tangier, Casablanca, and Marrakech itineraries — a genuine change of pace after the desert, the mountains, and the busier imperial cities.
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High Atlas Mountains
The High Atlas is the mountain range between Marrakech and the south, home to Mount Toubkal — North Africa's highest peak, at over 4,000 meters — and crossed by the Tizi n'Tichka pass on every one of our desert tours: the road that connects Marrakech to Ait Ben Haddou, Ouarzazate, and on toward the Sahara.
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