The desert region made famous by Hollywood (hint: Gladiator II was shot here)
Among the fire jugglers, snake charmers and storytellers who crowd by night into Djemaa el-Fna, the great square at the heart of Marrakech, there is a knot of four robed musicians, one with a hand drum, the rest clapping in syncopated time and singing.
Credit: Getty Images
“They are Amazigh people,” Lahcen, my guide, tells me. “From beyond the Atlas Mountains. Let’s go now. Their music can make you” – and his eyes roll up into his head. The next day, I’m in a four-wheel drive, travelling south from Marrakech towards the grey peaks of the Atlas.
The Atlas Mountains are the defining feature of the Moroccan landmass, dividing the green and more secular Morocco of the north from the desert oases, mud-walled kasbahs and Berber herders of the south. Just past Tizi n’Tichka, the high pass where the road crosses the mountains, we turn off onto the narrow road running through the Ounila Valley. This was once the main route for caravans on the trans-Saharan route: salt and dates flowing south to beyond Timbuktu; slaves and gold on the return journey.
The route was controlled by the rich and powerful Glaoui family from their titanic kasbah at Telouet, one of the main towns along the Ounila Valley. This was once a landmark, its rooms plated with exquisite zellij tilework, but the kasbah suffered badly in the earthquake that shook this part of Morocco in 2023. We lunch in its shadow at the Golden Lion of the Atlas restaurant, dining on chicken from the grill, a salad of tomatoes and olives, and almond milk and date smoothies, taken under a roof of plaited reeds that stripes us with zebra shadows.
Near the end of the gorge the road passes the village of Aït Benhaddou, a picture-perfect pyramid of kasbahs rising above a patchwork of corn fields alongside the rocky bed of the Ounila River. Traders coming from the south would once exchange their camels for donkeys here, since camels would have a tough time over the rocky passes of the High Atlas. Today it’s mostly fake, a stage set for the nearby city of Ouarzazate, the Hollywood of the Sahara. From Lawrence of Arabia to Gladiator II, when the script calls for dunes, camels, kaftans, burqas or anything else with a whiff of spice, sand and sandals, chances are the cast and crew will find themselves hunkered down in Ouarzazate.
South of Ouarzazate the road runs across a valley floor before another zigzag climb, through the Anti-Atlas Mountains this time. It’s harsher terrain than the Atlas Mountains, with less vegetation and fewer towns.
At Foum Zguid we turn off the road and head cross-country through a bleached wasteland overshadowed by the stumps of the Jbel Bani mountains that tower above us like rusting ships. We stop on the edge of a bluff and the ground is covered with fossilised trilobites, extinct marine invertebrates that first appeared about 520 million years ago. It’s evening when we finally arrive at our desert camp in the ochre sands of the Sahara. There’s ice (a miracle) and we gulp down chilled drinks handed out by Rashid, the camp boss.
Three musicians in embroidered indigo robes, heads wrapped in the enormous cheche turbans of the Tuareg Berbers, are warming up in the camp’s inner circle of tents. We sprawl on carpets and cushions spread out in front of a fire that lights the trio, our bare feet in the still warm sand. We listen until the music draws us into a dancing circle around the fire while a butter moon lights the night sky.
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