7 Day Morocco Itinerary

We collect you at the airport or your hotel and drive north along the coast. In Rabat we stop at the Hassan Tower and the Kasbah of the Udayas, where the lanes are painted the same blue as Chefchaouen and almost nobody photographs them. Then inland to Fez, arriving in the evening. If your flight lands early we add the Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca, which sits out over the Atlantic and is one of the few mosques in Morocco non-Muslims can enter.

A full day inside the oldest walled medina in the world with a licensed Fez guide — the city has nine thousand lanes and a guide is not a formality here. You will see the Chouara tanneries from a leather shop's terrace, the Bou Inania and Attarine madrasas, the mosaic workshops and the copper market. We keep the afternoon loose so you can go back to whatever caught you in the morning.

The longest drive of the week, and the most varied. Ifrane looks like an alpine village with pitched roofs; the cedar forest above Azrou has troops of Barbary macaques; then the land dries out through Midelt and the Ziz valley, where the palm groves run for kilometres below the road. We reach Merzouga in the late afternoon, swap the vehicle for camels and ride into the dunes for sunset. Dinner is tagine round the fire, and the drums come out afterwards.

Wake for sunrise over the dunes — the light lasts about twenty minutes and it is the reason people set an alarm on holiday. After breakfast at the camp we drive west through Rissani, our own town, and on to the Todra Gorge, where the walls close to ten metres apart and three hundred metres up. We follow the road of a thousand kasbahs into the Dades valley for the night.

West through the Valley of Roses and Skoura's palm grove to Ouarzazate, where the Atlas film studios sit beside the Taourirt kasbah. Then Ait Ben Haddou, the fortified ksar above the Ounila river — we cross on foot and climb to the granary for the view back over the valley. In the afternoon we take the Tizi n'Tichka pass over the High Atlas, topping 2,260 metres, and drop into Marrakech at dusk.

A guided morning through the Koutoubia, the Saadian Tombs, the Bahia Palace and the souks, then the afternoon free. Our advice: rest through the heat and come back to Jemaa el-Fna at dusk, when the food stalls are built in twenty minutes flat and the square changes character entirely. If you would rather escape the city, we can run you to the Ourika valley instead.

Breakfast, then transfer to Marrakech airport whenever your flight leaves. If you have a late departure we hold your bags and you keep the morning — the Majorelle garden and the Yves Saint Laurent museum are twenty minutes from most riads.