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Capital: Rabat
Population: 36.5 million+
Language: Arabic, Tamazight, Darija
1 – Kasbah of the Udayas (above)
The Kasbah of the Udayas, on a bluff where the Bou Regreg river meets the Atlantic in Rabat, is a 12th-century Almohad fortress entered through the carved gateway of Bab Oudaia, and part of the city’s UNESCO World Heritage listing of 2012.
Inside the Kasbah of the Udayas a maze of blue-and-white lanes, home in the 17th century to Andalusian Moriscos expelled from Spain, leads to a walled Andalusian garden and the Café Maure, with views over the estuary and the ocean.
In the 17th century the Bou Regreg estuary was home to the Salé Rovers, the Barbary corsairs who capture Robinson Crusoe in Defoe’s novel, and their one-time admiral Murat Reis led the raid from Algiers that sacked Baltimore, County Cork, in 1631.
2 – Atlas Mountains
The Atlas Mountains sweep across Morocco between the Atlantic coast and the Sahara, rising to Jbel Toubkal, at 4,167 m the highest peak in North Africa, and are the ancestral homeland of the Amazigh, or Berber, people.
The valleys of the Atlas are dotted with mud-brick villages, terraced fields and fortified kasbahs, trekkers climb to the summit of Toubkal, and in winter skiers head for Oukaïmeden, often billed as Africa’s highest ski resort.
The Atlas Mountains take their name from the Titan Atlas, whom the Greeks placed in the far west holding up the heavens, while Mercator’s 1595 book of maps, the first called an “atlas”, honoured a legendary scholar-king of Mauretania of the same name.
3 – El-Badi Palace
El Badi Palace, “the Incomparable”, in the heart of Marrakech, was begun by the Saadian sultan Ahmad al-Mansur after the Battle of the Three Kings in 1578, when Morocco crushed a Portuguese invasion, and was paid for with ransoms and gold from south of the Sahara.
El Badi was clad in Italian marble, onyx and gold leaf around a vast courtyard with sunken gardens and a great pool, but only its towering earthen walls survive, crowned by the nests of a colony of white storks.
Among the dead at the Battle of the Three Kings was Thomas Stukeley, whose papal expedition to invade Ireland had been diverted to Morocco, and about a century later, from 1696, Sultan Moulay Ismail stripped El Badi to adorn his new capital at Meknes.
4 – Chellah
Chellah, on a hillside just outside Rabat, stacks a thousand years into one walled garden, built over Sala Colonia, a Phoenician and Roman settlement on the far edge of Roman Africa, and later the burial ground of Morocco’s Marinid sultans.
Paths at Chellah wander from the tumbled columns of the Roman town to the Marinid necropolis, walled by Sultan Abu al-Hasan in 1339, with its monumental gateway, the tiled minaret of a ruined mosque and royal tombs topped by storks’ nests.
Local tradition holds that women who feed boiled eggs to the eels in the sacred pool at Chellah will be blessed with children.
5 – Hassan Tower, Rabat
The Hassan Tower, rising above the Bou Regreg in Rabat, is the unfinished minaret of a mosque begun around 1195 by the Almohad caliph Yaqub al-Mansur, meant to be the largest in the western Islamic world, and abandoned when he died in 1199.
The Hassan Tower stands 44 m, perhaps half its planned height, above some 348 columns of a prayer hall wrecked by the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, beside the Mausoleum of Mohammed V, completed in 1971.
Instead of stairs, the Hassan Tower has ramps winding up inside, said to have been wide enough for the muezzin to ride a horse to the top to give the call to prayer.
6 – Majorelle Garden, Marrakech
The Majorelle Garden, an oasis of calm in Marrakech, was the life’s work of the French painter Jacques Majorelle, who from the early 1920s spent some 40 years filling it with cacti, bamboo, palms and lily ponds.
The villa, fountains and pots of the Majorelle Garden are painted in Majorelle Blue, an intense cobalt the artist registered as a trademark, and his old studio houses the Pierre Bergé Museum of Berber Arts.
Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé bought the Majorelle Garden in 1980 to save it from hotel developers, and after Saint Laurent died in 2008 his ashes were scattered in the rose garden of his villa next door, with a memorial in the garden itself.
7 – Fez
Fez, founded by Idris I in 789 and expanded by his son Idris II, is the oldest of Morocco’s imperial cities, and its walled old town, Fes el-Bali, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1981, is believed to be the largest car-free urban area in the world.
More than 9,000 alleyways thread through Fez, leading to the Chouara tannery, thought to date from the 11th century, a honeycomb of stone vats where hides are dyed with natural colours such as saffron, poppy, indigo and henna.
At the heart of Fez stands al-Qarawiyyin, founded in 859, traditionally by a woman, Fatima al-Fihri, and recognised by Guinness World Records as the oldest existing, continually operating educational institution in the world, though it became a university in the modern sense only in 1963.
8 – Casablanca
Casablanca, Morocco’s largest city and economic capital, grew up on the Atlantic coast under French rule into a modern metropolis of boulevards and Art Deco buildings, and on 8 November 1942 US troops landed nearby at Fedala in Operation Torch.
The Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca, completed in 1993 and built partly out over the Atlantic, has a retractable roof, room for 25,000 worshippers inside and a 210 m minaret, the tallest in the world until 2019.
In January 1943 Roosevelt and Churchill met at the Anfa Conference in Casablanca and announced the demand for the Axis’s unconditional surrender, while the 1942 film Casablanca was shot almost entirely in Burbank, California, which is why a former US diplomat opened a Rick’s Café here in 2004.
9 – Aït Benhaddou
Aït Benhaddou, a ksar, or fortified village of packed red earth, climbs a hillside on the old caravan route between the Sahara and Marrakech, and was listed by UNESCO in 1987 as a fine example of southern Morocco’s earthen architecture.
Lanes and granaries climb through Aït Benhaddou to a fortified granary at the summit, with the High Atlas behind and the desert road running away to the south.
Aït Benhaddou has starred in Gladiator and The Mummy, and as the city of Yunkai in Game of Thrones, helped by the film studios of nearby Ouarzazate.
10 – Erg Chebbi, Merzouga
Erg Chebbi, near the village of Merzouga on the Algerian border, is a sea of orange dunes rising up to about 150 m above the stony desert and running some 22–28 km from north to south, the best-known erg in Morocco.
Camel treks lead out of Merzouga to desert camps among the dunes of Erg Chebbi, and after rain the seasonal lake of Dayet Srji fills at the dunes’ edge and draws flamingos.
Local legend says God buried a wealthy family under the sands of Erg Chebbi for refusing hospitality to a poor woman and her son, and in the hottest weeks of summer people are buried up to the neck in the hot sand as a traditional treatment for rheumatism.
11 – Essaouira
Essaouira, on Morocco’s windswept Atlantic coast, was known to Phoenician traders from the 7th century BC, and under King Juba II a workshop on Mogador island made the prized purple dye that gave the Îles Purpuraires their name.
The town of Essaouira was built from the 1760s for Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah by the French engineer Théodore Cornut, which is why its medina, UNESCO-listed in 2001, lies inside European-style sea walls lined with bronze cannon, beside a busy fishing harbour.
Jimi Hendrix made a brief visit to Essaouira in 1969, and local stories say a ruined palace nearby inspired “Castles Made of Sand”, but the song was released in 1967, two years before he arrived.
12 – Chefchaouen
Chefchaouen, high in the Rif mountains, was founded in 1471 as a fortress against the Portuguese and grew with Muslim and Jewish refugees from Spain, staying almost closed to outsiders until Spanish troops arrived in 1920.
The old town of Chefchaouen is washed in every shade of blue beneath the twin horn-like peaks that give it its name, with the kasbah on Uta el-Hammam square and the Spanish Mosque on a hill above.
Nobody agrees why Chefchaouen is blue, with theories crediting its Jewish community, a symbol of heaven, a way of keeping mosquitoes away or a more recent push for tourism.
13 – Volubilis
Volubilis, on a slope below Mount Zerhoun near Meknes, may have served as a second capital for the Berber king Juba II before Rome annexed his kingdom in the 40s AD, and grew into a remote Roman city of some 20,000 people, rich on olive oil, until Rome withdrew around 285.
Volubilis, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1997, has the Arch of Caracalla of AD 217, a basilica, a capitol, olive presses and floor mosaics of Orpheus and the Labours of Hercules, though much of its stone went to build Moulay Ismail’s Meknes.
People kept living at Volubilis after Rome left, and in 788 Idris I, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, was made leader here by the local Awraba Berbers, founding the Idrisid dynasty, often called Morocco’s first Islamic dynasty.