The High Atlas & the Atlantic

Marrakech is wonderful and exhausting in roughly equal measure, so we keep it to two nights and use it as a prologue. After that the route heads uphill, into the High Atlas, where the Berber villages of the Imlil valley sit among terraces of walnut and barley. The walking is real but not heroic: three to five hours a day, with a mule for your bags and a guide who grew up in the next valley. You arrive in the evening with legs that have earned dinner.

Inês would choose the roads carefully. The Tizi n’Test is the dramatic way across the range, a narrow pass built for the French army in the 1920s, and it takes most of a day. Done well, with a driver who knows where the lorries pass and a stop at Tinmel for the Almohad mosque, it is the best day of the trip. Done badly, in the wrong weather, it is a long ride with a view. She watches the forecast and keeps an alternative route on hand.

She would also decide where you sleep. In the mountains she prefers family-run houses with a proper terrace to anything with a lobby; in Taroudant and Essaouira she would put you somewhere central enough to walk out for dinner. If you are travelling with children, she would soften the walking and add a night in a farmhouse near Asni, where there are goats.

The trade-off is that this is not a restful trip. It is a lot of road for nine nights, and some days begin early. Essaouira helps: the final two nights are deliberately empty, so there is room to do nothing between the ramparts and the beach. If you want more rest and less distance, we would drop Taroudant and give the mountains another night. Both are good trips; they are different trips, and we would rather ask than guess.