4 Days desert tour from Fes to Marrakech via great southern

Day 1: Fes – Ifrane – Cedar forest – Midelt – Ziz valley – Merzouga

An early start — we collect you from your riad in Fes at eight, because there is a lot of country to cross today. The road climbs into the Middle Atlas to Ifrane, a town of pitched roofs and clipped hedges that looks imported from the Alps and gets snow every winter. Beyond it is the cedar forest of Azrou, where the Barbary macaques gather near the road. Lunch at Midelt, the apple town below Jbel Ayachi. In the afternoon we cross the Tizi-n-Talremt pass and drop into the Ziz valley — the viewpoint over the palm groves running along the river is the photograph of the day. Through Errachidia and Erfoud, known for its dates and its fossil workshops, arriving at Merzouga in the evening for the night in a hotel at the edge of the dunes.

Day 2: The Merzouga region – nomads – Khamlia – Rissani – camel trek and desert camp

Today you stay in the desert instead of driving through it. We go off-road to a nomad family camped on the hamada, and sit with them over Berber tea while they explain how the year works when you follow the water. Then Khamlia, the village south of Merzouga settled by the descendants of people brought north from Mali, Sudan and Niger, where the Gnawa musicians still play the music that came with them. Lunch at Rissani, after a walk through its souk — dates, spices, livestock, and the donkey park outside, one of the last markets of its kind. Back at Merzouga in the late afternoon you swap the car for a camel and ride out into Erg Chebbi, stopping high on a dune as the sun goes down. The night is at a desert camp: dinner, drums round the fire, and a sky with nothing between you and it.

Day 3: Merzouga – Erfoud – Tinghir – Todra gorges – Dades valley

Set an alarm for the sunrise if you can — the sand changes colour minute by minute and the shadows are never longer. After breakfast at camp we drive west towards Tinghir and the Todra gorges, stopping on the way at the khettara, the underground irrigation channels cut at a shallow gradient so water travels miles to the fields without evaporating; you can climb down inside one. At Todra the canyon walls come within a few metres of each other with three hundred metres of rock above, and there is time to walk up through it or along the gardens at its mouth. Later we continue into the Dades valley, which was seabed millions of years ago — sediment laid down around coral reefs, pressed into sandstone and limestone, then lifted clear when the Atlas rose. It is why the cliffs here are banded the way they are. Night in a hotel or kasbah in the valley.

Day 4: Dades – Roses valley – Skoura – Ouarzazate – Ait Ben Haddou – Telouet – Marrakech

The long day, and worth knowing that in advance: we cover the whole stretch from the Dades to Marrakech before dark. West through the Valley of the Roses at Kela’a M’gouna, where the Damascene rose harvest each May supplies rose water and oil sold across Morocco, and on into the palm oasis of Skoura, where Kasbah Amridil — the one on the old fifty-dirham note — is compact, intact and worth the stop. Past Ouarzazate to Ait Ben Haddou, the fortified ksar rising in tiers above the Ounila river, UNESCO-listed and the most filmed building in the country. From there the road climbs to Telouet, deep in the mountains, once the seat of El Glaoui, the last Pasha of Marrakech, who controlled the Tizi-n-Tichka pass from it. We cross the pass in the late afternoon and come down into Marrakech, where your driver takes you to your riad. End of the tour.

Prefer not to do all of that in one day? Our 5-day Fes desert tour splits this final stretch across two days with a night in Ouarzazate.