Morocco: Imlil and the High Atlas

🏔️ Into the High Atlas: Rockfalls, Reassurances and the Road South

The drive into the High Atlas Mountains was, depending on your disposition, either thrilling or mildly alarming. Our driver had decided early in the proceedings that one of his core professional responsibilities was to keep us informed about rockfalls. He pointed them out along the road with the patient satisfaction of a man who had been vindicated by the landscape — each modest heap of gravel or scatter of stones received a meaningful look and a slight tilt of the chin, as if to say: you see? Dangerous. Very dangerous.

It was not especially dangerous. The road was entirely clear. The rockfalls, such as they were, amounted to the sort of debris you might expect anywhere that gravity and loose rock are in regular conversation. But he was committed to his narrative, and we were in no position to argue. He knew the road. We did not. We sat quietly and let him have his moment.

🌿 A Stop for Argan Oil — and Why It Matters

We pulled over at a roadside cooperative run by local Berber women, and it is worth lingering here because argan oil is genuinely interesting, which is not something you can say about most things you encounter at a roadside stop.

The argan tree — Argania spinosa, if you want to be precise about it — is endemic to the Sous-Massa region of southwestern Morocco and a small pocket of western Algeria. It grows nowhere else on earth in any meaningful quantity. This is not a minor geographical footnote. It makes the argan tree one of the rarest and most geographically restricted useful trees in the world, and it explains why the Moroccan government has been reasonably energetic about protecting it. The tree earned UNESCO protection when the Arganeraie Biosphere Reserve was designated in 1998, covering roughly two and a half million hectares of southwestern Morocco. That is a lot of territory, and it reflects the tree’s considerable ecological importance.

The argan tree itself is a remarkable thing. It is drought-resistant in a way that most vegetation simply isn’t, capable of tapping groundwater at depths that would defeat less determined plants. It lives for up to two hundred years, which means some of the trees standing in those Moroccan valleys today were already old when Napoleon was making a nuisance of himself in Egypt. The roots go deep, the trunk is gnarled and thorny, and the whole thing looks as though it has spent centuries arguing with the landscape and winning. Which is essentially what it has done.

The oil comes from the kernel inside the fruit, and extracting it is not a quick business. The fruit is dried, the outer flesh removed, the hard nut cracked by hand — and this is the laborious part, because the nut does not cooperate — and the kernels inside are cold-pressed to produce the oil. The women at the cooperative did this by hand, which is still the traditional method, and watching it made you feel that your own daily life was rather undemanding by comparison.

The oil has two distinct lives. In cosmetics, it commands considerable prices in European and North American markets, where it is marketed as something between a miracle and a luxury. In Moroccan cuisine, it is simply an ingredient — warm, nutty, distinctly different from olive oil, and used in everything from amlou (a Moroccan almond paste that is rather wonderful and entirely underappreciated outside the country) to dipping sauces for bread. The cooperative model matters here because it channels income directly to the women producing the oil, many of whom are from rural communities where employment options are not plentiful. It is, in short, a good thing, and the oil is excellent, and we bought some, as one does.

🛣️ The Tizi n’Tichka Pass: Two Hours, 2,260 Metres and a Driver with Strong Views on Momentum

The route over the Tizi n’Tichka Pass climbs to 2,260 metres above sea level. That is not the highest road in Morocco — that distinction belongs to the Tizi n’Test, further west — but it is the main crossing of the High Atlas and the principal road link between Marrakech and Ouarzazate, which is the gateway to the southern desert regions beyond. It is, in other words, an important road, and it has been important for a long time.

The French built the current road during the Protectorate period in the 1930s, following more or less the line of an older mule track that had served the same purpose for centuries before tarmac was considered a reasonable idea. The completion of the road transformed the economy of the region in a way that is difficult to overstate. Before it existed, crossing the High Atlas was a serious undertaking that took several days on foot or by mule and was genuinely dangerous in winter when the passes filled with snow. Whole communities on the southern side of the mountains were effectively cut off from the markets of Marrakech for months at a time. The road changed all of that, opening the southern valleys to regular commercial traffic and connecting communities that had previously existed in a kind of productive isolation.

Now it takes roughly two hours by car. Our driver appeared to have formed a close personal relationship with the concept of momentum, which meant the hairpin bends were approached with a certain improvisational enthusiasm that Karen found less than entirely reassuring. The crash barriers along the more exposed sections had a theoretical quality about them — present in principle, not necessarily something you would want to test. We did not test them. We arrived intact. These are the important facts.

⛰️ The High Atlas: A Brief Geological Digression (Bear With Me)

The High Atlas range is part of the broader Atlas mountain system that stretches roughly 2,500 kilometres from southwestern Morocco all the way to northeastern Tunisia. It is, by any measure, a substantial piece of geography, and it has been there for a very long time — though not always in its current form.

The mountains were formed during what geologists call the Alpine orogeny, which is the same broad geological event that produced the Alps, the Pyrenees and, rather more dramatically, the Himalayas. It happened as the African and Eurasian tectonic plates ground into each other over tens of millions of years, crumpling the rock between them into ranges that now run in rough parallel bands from west to east across North Africa and southern Europe. The Atlas mountains are, in this sense, distant cousins of Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn, which is a pleasing thought if you are the sort of person who finds pleasing thoughts in geology. I am, occasionally.

The highest point in Morocco — and in all of North Africa, excluding the volcanic islands — is Jebel Toubkal, which stands at 4,167 metres and lies a short distance from the village of Imlil. It is a popular trekking and mountaineering destination, attracting climbers from across Europe and beyond, particularly in spring and autumn when the conditions are reasonable. In winter it is properly alpine and requires proper alpine equipment, which has not always been obvious to optimistic visitors who have arrived underprepared. The mountain rescue teams earn their keep.

The range’s inhabitants — the Imazighen, to use their own name for themselves, which translates roughly as “free people” and is considerably more dignified than the Roman term Berber, which came from the Greek for barbarian and was never especially complimentary — have lived and farmed these valleys for thousands of years. They developed an intricate system of collective water management known as khettara: a network of underground channels that brings water from the mountains down to the villages and fields below without pumping, using only gravity and considerable engineering ingenuity. It is ancient infrastructure that still works. Some of our modern infrastructure could learn from it.

🏘️ Imlil: A Working Mountain Village That Happens to Be Spectacular

We reached the Berber Family Lodge, perched on a hillside just south of Imlil, shortly after six in the evening. The village itself sits at roughly 1,740 metres above sea level and serves as the main base for climbers and trekkers heading for Toubkal. It has grown considerably since trekking tourism took hold in the 1970s and 1980s — before that it was simply a mountain village, known mainly to the people who lived there and the mule traders who passed through — but it has retained the functional, unsentimental character of a place where people actually live and work rather than simply exist for the benefit of tourists.

Mule trains are still a more practical means of transport than vehicles on many of the surrounding paths, which is why one was engaged to carry our bags up to the lodge. This is not a quaint affectation. The paths are genuinely too narrow and too steep for anything with four wheels, and the mules know their business rather better than any vehicle would. There is something pleasantly humbling about watching an animal carry your luggage up a mountain path with complete indifference to the effort involved.

The lodge was built in traditional Berber style, with rammed-earth walls and flat-roofed terraces that blended into the hillside in the way that good vernacular architecture always does — as though it had grown there rather than been constructed. Inside, the rooms were furnished simply with locally woven textiles and kilims in the deep reds, burnt oranges and golds that are characteristic of Atlas weaving, a tradition that goes back centuries and produces work of genuine quality rather than the factory-approximate versions you find in the souks of Marrakech. The room looked out over the valley and towards snow-capped peaks that caught the last of the evening light as we arrived. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, rather good.

🍽️ An Unlikely Gathering and Another Tagine

That evening, in one of the communal rooms, we fell into conversation with a collection of people that you would not naturally assemble in any other context — which is one of the things that travel does well when it is working properly.

Lola, from Barcelona, and Maddie, from England, were journalism students at Oxford Brookes on a research trip. They had the particular quality of young journalists everywhere: enthusiastic, well-intentioned, and slightly more certain about everything than the available evidence quite warranted. It is not a criticism. Certainty is a useful fuel when you are starting out. It tends to erode on its own with time.

Noel was an American photographer working in Morocco to document women in rural markets. He was thoughtful and interesting company, though occasionally operating on a slightly different social frequency to everyone else in the room — the kind of person who pauses mid-conversation to notice something nobody else has noticed, which is probably what makes him a good photographer and occasionally a slightly disconcerting dinner companion.

A Dutch woman working in London and a British woman based in Geneva provided a useful reminder of how thoroughly European professional life had scattered people across the continent. Lottie was a British Airways first officer, which I found quietly impressive, and her partner Harry was an actuary — a profession that involves making sense of probability and risk in ways that most people find either incomprehensible or deeply depressing, but which Harry seemed to take entirely in his stride. And then there was Max, a retired Frenchman who had decamped to Marrakech some years earlier for reasons he didn’t entirely specify and showed no sign of wanting to explain. He had the air of a man who had made a decision he was thoroughly satisfied with and saw no need to justify it to anyone. Fair enough, frankly.

Dinner was another vegetable tagine. The mountains outside were quiet. The conversation inside was not. On balance, that was the better arrangement.

🌅 A Morning Worth Keeping: The View from the Atlas Lodge

We woke to one of those mornings that makes you momentarily forget all your grievances with the world. Through the bedroom window, the High Atlas Mountains stood in composed, magnificent silence, bathed in a pale golden light that softened their more brutal edges. It was the sort of view that makes you wish time had a handbrake. It does not. Time is entirely indifferent to scenic considerations.

We were due to leave at ten o’clock. A note arrived revising this to twenty past, which surprised nobody. Our driver had apparently abandoned his original plan to stay in the village overnight and was now making his way from Marrakech, where he conveniently kept an apartment. Having spent sufficient time in his company to understand his particular operating system, we suspected this had rather more to do with seeing friends than anything logistical. We filed the update accordingly and had another cup of coffee.

☕ The Small Sadness of Leaving

Breakfast was a very good argument for lingering. The other guests were excellent company, the food was decent, and nobody was in any particular rush — except that we were, slightly, because we had roughly four hundred kilometres of road between us and the Atlantic coast.

Essaouira was the destination: a port city on Morocco’s western edge with a history stretching back to the Phoenicians, which is the sort of lineage that puts most European cities quietly in their place. The Phoenicians were the great maritime traders of the ancient Mediterranean world, operating from bases along the coast of modern Lebanon and establishing trading posts across North Africa, Spain, and as far west as the Atlantic coast of Morocco from around 1200 BCE onwards. Essaouira — or Mogador, as it was known under various iterations of its colonial history — was one of those posts. It has been continuously inhabited and commercially active for a very long time.

But that was four hundred kilometres away, and first there was the business of saying goodbye to people you had known for two days but rather liked, which is one of travel’s small, recurring melancholies. There is never quite enough time in these places. One more night, a proper walk in the mountains, a chance to get properly acquainted with the valley below — none of it was going to happen. Time, as ever, was disinterested in our preferences. We shouldered our bags, said our goodbyes, and headed back down the hill.

💭 Reflections

The High Atlas is the sort of place that makes you feel slightly ashamed of how little effort you have put into the rest of your life. People have farmed these valleys, managed water through underground channels, crossed these passes on foot in winter, and generally got on with things in difficult circumstances for thousands of years. We drove over in a couple of hours, stayed one comfortable night in a well-appointed lodge, ate well, slept well, and left feeling we had hardly scratched the surface.

The cooperative stop stays with me. Not in a sentimental way, but practically. The women cracking argan nuts by hand is a reminder that most of what we consider convenient or efficient has been made so by someone else’s considerable labour, usually somewhere we are not looking. The oil is good. The work behind it is harder than it looks.

Imlil itself was a surprise — not what I had expected of a trekking hub, which I had imagined would be more commercialised, more self-conscious. It was just a village that had adapted to visitors without losing sight of itself. The mules were still there. The terraced fields were still there. The mountains were still there. They were not performing anything for our benefit. They were simply present, as they had been for a very long time, and would be long after we had gone.

The evening conversation at the lodge was one of those accidental, unrepeatable things that travel occasionally produces — a table of strangers with nothing obviously in common, talking properly for a few hours, and then dispersing back into their separate lives. It happens rarely enough that it is worth noting when it does.

The tagine was fine.