The South & The Sahara

Nothing north of the Atlas can prepare you for ‘Le Grand Sud’, a vast expanse of desert and semi-arid mountains stretching to the Algerian border.

There is hardly a road in the region that cannot be described as spectacular. It is a visual dream - wide valleys studded with palm-packed oases, mud-built castles rearing out of the ground, jagged blue mountains stretching across almost every vista.

Long belts of date palm oases, scattered with the fabulous mud architecture of the kasbahs and fortified ksour villages, the great southern river valleys - the Drâa, Dadès and Ziz - were once the old caravan routes that reached back to Marrakech and Fez and out across the Sahara to Timbuktu, Niger and old Sudan, carrying gold, slaves and salt well into the nineteenth century.

The regions undisputed scenic highlight is the Erg Chebbi dunes. Rising to 150m in places, these giant sand hills lining the Algerian border come closer to anywhere else in the country - at least anywhere that’s reasonably accessible - to fulfilling most people’s expectations of what a true desert should be.

The highest dunes are those in the centre of the Erg Chebbi, near, or just north, of Merzouga village. Rising dramatically from a plain of blackened wasteland and scrub - known as ‘hammada’ to the Berbers - it’s a magical landscape, which deserves much more than just a sunrise glimpse. The dunes themselves are fascinating, changing colour from pink to gold to red at different times of the day.

For bird-watchers, this is the best area in Morocco for spotting many desert species, including desert sparrows, Egyptian night-jars, desert warblers, fulvous babblers and blue-cheeked bee-eaters. Sometimes in the spring a shallow lake appears north-west of Merzouga, attracting flocks of pink flamingos and other water birds.