Between the Atlantic Ocean and the Atlas Mountains lies a route of roughly 450 kilometres, from the port city of Agadir to the dunes of Erg Chegaga. In five days we cross the Souss plain, the saffron fields of Taliouine, and the stony desert of the Draa.
Between the Atlantic Ocean and the Atlas Mountains runs a five-day route south from Agadir. We drive the Souss plain, the saffron fields around Taliouine, and the stony desert of the Draa before the dunes of Erg Chegaga rise at the end of the road.
The route begins in Agadir, a working port of around 400,000 people with a long beach, a fish market at the harbour, and cafés that fill after sunset. We start early on the beach as the sun comes up over the Atlantic, walk up to the Kasbah Oufella on the hill above the bay, and eat a Moroccan breakfast, msemen, olive oil, mint tea, at a local café.
We leave the coast and drive inland, trading the traffic of the city for the argan groves and dry valleys of Souss-Massa National Park. Barbary macaques live here, and the park holds one of the last wild populations in Morocco.
We continue south to Taroudant, called the «Grandmother of Marrakech» for its red ramparts and its medina, which is small enough to walk in a morning. The souk sells Berber rugs, pottery, and spices, and the square inside the walls is busiest before noon.
At night we stay in a riad inside the walls, where dinner is tagine and couscous served under the stars, often with a Gnawa group playing after the meal. Gnawa music, the guembri, the iron castanets called qraqeb, is one of the sounds of southern Morocco.
The road turns east into the Atlas, to Taliouine, the saffron capital of Morocco. Every autumn the town harvests saffron from Crocus sativus; local growers show us how the flowers are picked before dawn and the three red stigmas are separated by hand.
After a lunch cooked with saffron, we climb through mountain passes, past terraced fields and Berber villages built against the rock walls above the road.
We drive deeper into the Sahara toward Erg Chegaga, a dune field about 45 kilometres west of M'Hamid and the largest in Morocco. The last stretch is off-road in a 4x4, over gravel and dry lakebed, until the dunes rise out of the flat ground.
We camp at the foot of the dunes, in tents around a fire. Our Berber guides cook and tell us how their families moved with herds between the Draa and the Drâa valley pastures before the roads arrived.
We climb the highest dune before dawn. The light comes up behind the sand and the colour of the dunes changes from grey to deep orange over about twenty minutes. From the top you can see the ridge line of the Drâa valley and, on a clear day, the Atlas on the horizon.
We walk back to the 4x4s and drive north to Agadir, about eight hours including stops. The trip ends there, but the route through the Souss, Taliouine, and the Draa is one you can repeat in a different season, when the light and the roads are different again.
On the drive back to Agadir we carry photographs, a few kilos of dates, and a better sense of how the south fits together: the coast, the mountains, the saffron, and the desert all lie within a day of one another. The route from Agadir to Erg Chegaga covers close to 450 kilometres each way, and the desert at the end stays with you.
We say goodbye to the dunes and drive north with the sun behind us. If you come back, and most people do, the same road will look different in spring, when the argan trees are in flower and the Draa is running.
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