Agafay Desert and Atlas Mountains Day Trip from Marrakech

This is a splendid trip during which you will discover the most diverse and spectacular landscapes. Your Day Trip takes you past lush vegetation, olive and orange orchards, and the occasional village. Off the tarmac and onto off-road, the scenery is completely different - barren light brown plateaux, a true stone desert. The locals call it Agafay desert: this might as well be the Sahara as the feeling of solitude. For all those who haven’t got sufficient time in Morocco for a Sahara desert tour, all the way south then the Agafay desert is the best thing to do instead, the Agafay desert is not a Sand desert – but more sandstone and earthen plateau, traditional mud-built villages, dusty riverbeds are interspersed with spectacular sumptuous pasture and vegetation in springtime. There we can sample a tea with the locals or experience trekking by camel.

Our itinerary takes us up into the Atlas Mountains. Kik Plateau is 1800 meters high and offers spectacular 360 degrees views and, in the spring, a marvellous spread of alpine flowers. Scattered Berber hamlets greet the view and it feels like you travelled back in time.

On the other side of the plateau, there is the Asni Valley in the heart of this lush area covered with apple, cherry, and plum orchards sending out their harvest into the city. A nice Berber market is held on every Saturday where producers bring fruit, vegetables, and livestock to sell. If you are interested in seeing a Berber souk, almost every village has one on a specific day of the week.

We will continue to climb upwards until you leave the main road at an altitude of over 2000 meters with views to Mount Toubkal: the highest peak in Northern Africa culminating at 4167 meters, and often snowcapped. Then we will follow an ancient, partly paved Berber track to reach the Imlil valley an authentic area famous for apple trees, here you will have lunch in a Berber house in a village overlooking the Atlas Mountains.

The food will be homemade and organic: tomato salad, chicken tagine, couscous, and fruits. After lunch we will head off back to Marrakech, crossing the Mizan valley small villages with their mud-brick adobe houses, stacked into the hillside or lining the watercourse shaded by the apple grove. The river gives place to the canyons and the local Berber granary towers over the landscape. Past Tahnaoute, the tarmac road follows its course among olive or orange orchards to reach Marrakech by afternoon.