9 days trip tour from Tangier to Sahara desert

Day 1: Tangier – Tetouan – Chefchaouen

We leave Tangier heading east to Tetouan, whose medina is Hispano-Moorish rather than Arab-Andalusian like the rest of Morocco’s — the Ensanche quarter, with its restored white Spanish colonial fronts, is where we stop for lunch. The archaeological museum at the edge of the medina holds finds from the Phoenician and Roman settlements at Tamuda and Volubilis, worth twenty minutes before you go. Then south across the green Rif mountains to Chefchaouen, the blue-washed town in the hills. The evening is yours: the medina is small enough to wander without a map, and the Rif kitchens do things the rest of the country does not — the local goat’s cheese in particular.

Day 2: Chefchaouen – Volubilis – Meknes – Fes

After breakfast we drive south through Ouazzane and the Rif villages to Volubilis, the Roman city on the plain below Zerhoun — the mosaics are still in the floors where they were laid, uncovered and in the open. On to Meknes, Moulay Ismail’s seventeenth-century capital, for lunch and a walk along the city walls to Bab Mansour, the great gate, and the sultan’s mausoleum. We reach Fes in the late afternoon and stay the night there.

Day 3: Guided day in Fes

A full day walking Fes el-Bali with an English-speaking local guide, which is the only sensible way to see it — there are some nine thousand lanes in the old city and no logic to them. You go through the pottery souk, the metalworkers, the instrument makers and the carpet sellers, and out onto the terraces above the Chouara tanneries, where the dye pits have been worked the same way since the eleventh century. Along the way: the Zaouia of Moulay Idriss II, the Bab Bou Jeloud gate, the Al-Qarawiyyin mosque and university — founded in 859 and the oldest still operating anywhere — the Al-Attarine Madrasa, the Nejjarine fountain and its museum of wood crafts, the royal palace gates, the Dar Batha museum, and the mellah. We finish at one of the hilltop forts for the view over the whole medina at dusk. Dinner and the night at your riad.

Day 4: Fes – Ifrane – Cedar forest – Midelt – Ziz valley – Merzouga

An eight o’clock start and a long day south. Ifrane first, with its pitched roofs and hedges, called the Switzerland of Morocco and looking the part. Then the cedar forest at Azrou, where the Barbary macaques come to the roadside. Lunch at Midelt, apple country, under Jbel Ayachi. Over the Tizi-n-Talremt pass and down into the Ziz valley, where the palm groves follow the river for miles below the road. Through Errachidia and Erfoud — dates and fossils — and into Merzouga for the night in a hotel by the dunes.

Day 5: The Merzouga region – nomads – Khamlia – Rissani – camel trek and camp

The day that makes this the nine-day tour rather than the eight. Instead of leaving the dunes this morning, you spend the whole day in them. We drive off-road to a nomad family camped on the hamada and sit for Berber tea while they explain how they move with the water and what the seasons out here actually mean. Then Khamlia, the village settled by descendants of people brought north from Mali, Sudan and Niger, where the Gnawa musicians still play and are happy to explain what the songs are for. Lunch at Rissani, after walking the souk — one of the last great caravan markets, with dates and spices and a donkey park outside. In the late afternoon you leave the car for a camel and ride into Erg Chebbi, stopping high on a dune for the sunset, then on to the desert camp for dinner, drumming round the fire and a sky with nothing in the way of it.

Day 6: Merzouga – Erfoud – Tinghir – Todra gorges – Dades valley

Worth waking for the sunrise. After breakfast at camp we head west to Tinghir and the Todra gorges, stopping at the khettara on the way — the underground channels dug at a shallow gradient so that water reaches the fields without evaporating on the way; you can climb down into one and see how it was done. At Todra the canyon narrows to a few metres with three hundred metres of rock overhead, and there is time to walk up it or through the gardens below. The afternoon carries on into the Dades valley. All this was seabed once, silted around coral reefs and compressed to sandstone and limestone before the Atlas lifted it clear — which is why the cliffs are banded and full of shells. Night in a hotel or kasbah.

Day 7: Dades – Roses valley – Skoura – Ait Ben Haddou – Telouet – Marrakech

West through the Valley of the Roses at Kela’a M’gouna, where the May harvest supplies rose water and oil sold across the country, then the palm oasis of Skoura and Kasbah Amridil, small, intact and familiar from the old fifty-dirham note. Past Ouarzazate to Ait Ben Haddou, the ksar stacked up the hillside above the river — UNESCO-listed, and the backdrop to more films than any other building in Morocco. The road then climbs to Telouet, hidden in the mountains, once the seat of El Glaoui, the last Pasha of Marrakech, who held the Tizi-n-Tichka from it; the painted ceilings inside are a surprise given the ruin outside. Over the pass and down into Marrakech at the end of the afternoon, with dinner at your riad.

Day 8: Guided day in Marrakech

A full day with a local guide in the red city. You walk the medina souks — bakers, carpenters, spice merchants, apothecaries, the dyers’ lane — and visit the Medersa Ben Youssef, the Bahia Palace and the Koutoubia, whose minaret has set the skyline since the twelfth century. The morning ends at Jemaa el-Fnaa, where lunch on a roof terrace puts the whole square below you: acrobats, storytellers, musicians, snake charmers. In the afternoon we drive out to Gueliz for the Majorelle Garden, planted by the painter Jacques Majorelle and later saved by Yves Saint Laurent. Go back to the square after dark if you can — the grills come out, the smoke goes up and the drummers start, and it is a different place entirely. Dinner at your riad.

Day 9: Marrakech – airport

Breakfast, then a transfer to Marrakech Menara airport for your flight. End of your nine-day tour from Tangier.