6 days trip from Fes to desert Sahara tours

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

We collect you from your riad in Fes at eight and head south into the Middle Atlas. The first stop is Ifrane, which looks nothing like the rest of Morocco — pitched roofs, clipped hedges, snow in winter — and is known locally as the Switzerland of Morocco. Beyond it the road runs through the cedar forest of Azrou, home to the Barbary macaques, who are entirely unbothered by visitors. Lunch is at Midelt, the apple-growing town below Jbel Ayachi. Afterwards we cross the Tizi-n-Talremt pass and drop into the Ziz valley, where the palm groves run for miles along the river below the road — the best viewpoint of the day. Through Errachidia and Erfoud, known for its dates and its fossil workshops, and on to Merzouga, where the first night is in a hotel at the edge of the dunes.

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

A full day in the desert rather than driving through it. We go off-road to visit a nomad family living out on the hamada, and sit for Berber tea while they explain how they move with the water and the seasons. Then Khamlia, the village south of Merzouga settled by descendants of people brought north from Mali, Sudan and Niger, where the Gnawa musicians still play the rhythms that came with them. Lunch is at Rissani, after a walk through one of the last great desert souks — dates, spices, livestock, and the donkey park outside. Back at Merzouga in the late afternoon you swap the car for a camel and ride into the Erg Chebbi dunes, stopping on a high crest for the sunset. The night is at a desert camp: dinner, drums round the fire, and a sky with no light pollution in it for a hundred miles.

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

Worth setting an alarm for the sunrise — the dunes change colour by the minute and the shadows are at their longest. After breakfast at camp we drive west towards Tinghir and the Todra gorges. On the way we stop at the khettara, the underground irrigation channels that carry water for miles at a shallow gradient so it never evaporates before it reaches the fields; you can climb down into one and see how they were dug. At Todra the canyon walls close to a few metres apart and rise three hundred above you, and there is time to walk up through it or along the gardens below. The afternoon runs into the Dades valley. All of this was seabed once, silted up around coral reefs and pressed into sandstone and limestone before the Atlas rose and lifted it clear — which is why the rock here is banded and full of shells. Night in a hotel or kasbah in the valley.

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

West through the valley of the roses at Kela’a M’gouna, where the Damascene rose harvest happens each May, and into the palm groves of Skoura, where Kasbah Amridil — the one from the old fifty-dirham note — is small, intact and well worth the half hour. Past Ouarzazate and on to Ait Ben Haddou, the fortified ksar above the river, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the most filmed building in Morocco. From there the road climbs to Telouet, buried 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 afternoon and come down into Marrakech, where you check in — with two nights still ahead of you.

Day 5: Guided sightseeing day in Marrakech

The day the shorter version of this tour does not include. A local English-speaking guide meets you at the hotel and walks you into the medina of the red city: the Medersa Ben Youssef with its carved cedar and zellij courtyard, the Bahia Palace, the Saadian Tombs, and the Koutoubia, whose minaret has set the skyline since the twelfth century. In between you go through the souks proper — the dyers’ lane, the carpenters, the spice and apothecary stalls, the metalworkers you hear before you see. The morning ends at Jemaa el-Fnaa, where lunch on a roof terrace gives you the whole square laid out below. In the afternoon we drive out to Gueliz for the Majorelle Garden, planted by the painter Jacques Majorelle and later restored by Yves Saint Laurent. Go back to the square after dark if you have any energy left: the grills come out, the smoke goes up, and the drummers start.

Day 6: Marrakech – airport

Breakfast at your hotel, then a transfer to Marrakech Menara airport whenever your flight requires — the reason many people choose this version over the shorter one, which puts you in the city only the evening before. End of your Fes to Marrakech desert tour.