How many days do you need in the Moroccan desert?

There are two deserts, and that is the whole answer

Most people picture one Sahara. From Marrakech there are two quite different trips, and choosing between them is the decision that sets the length of your holiday.

Zagora, down the Draa valley, is the near one. You cross the High Atlas in the morning and you are standing on sand the same day.

Merzouga, and the Erg Chebbi dunes beside it, is the famous one: the tall orange sand sea in the photographs. It sits several hours further east, and that distance is the whole answer to the question. Zagora works in two days. Merzouga does not, and anybody who tells you it does is planning to drive you through the night.

Two days: Zagora

Day one crosses the High Atlas by the Tichka pass, stops at the kasbah of Ait Ben Haddou and at Ouarzazate, then follows the Draa valley through Agdez to Zagora, where a camel takes you the last stretch into camp. Day two brings you back the same way.

Be honest with yourself about what that is: two long days in a car with one night of sand and stars in the middle. Travellers who have four or five days in Morocco in total love it, because it is the only way to fit the desert in at all. Travellers who came for the dunes in the photographs usually wish they had gone further east.

Three days: Merzouga and the Erg Chebbi dunes

Three days is the shortest honest trip to the big dunes from Marrakech.

Day one is the Tichka pass, Ait Ben Haddou and Ouarzazate, sleeping in the Dades valley. Day two runs through the Dades gorge, Tinejdad and Erfoud, and reaches Merzouga in the afternoon, in time for the camels and the camp. Day three drives back to Marrakech.

This is the trip most people are imagining when they write to us, and it works. The one thing to know before you book it is that day three is long, because you cover in a single push what you spread across two days on the way out.

Four days, and the thing most people do not realise

You do not have to come back the way you came.

Marrakech and Fes both sit about a day from the desert, on opposite sides of it. So a four-day trip can begin in Marrakech and end in Fes, or the other way round, and you never drive the same road twice.

The day you would have spent retracing your route becomes a whole day in Merzouga instead: the dunes at sunrise, a nomad family, the flat hammada beyond the sand, and time to do nothing in particular.

If your flights are flexible, this is the single best decision you can make about a Morocco trip. The same desert, a full extra day inside it, and two imperial cities instead of one.

Five or six days, if you would rather stop hurrying

Six days from Marrakech turns the drive itself into the holiday.

You get both of the great gorges rather than one, Todgha as well as Dades. You get an evening at Ait Ben Haddou rather than a photograph of it from the car park. You get time with a nomad family, and the Draa valley and its palm groves on the way home, so even the return is new country.

Nobody needs six days to see a dune. You take six days because the road south is one of the good drives on earth, and it deserves better than being got through.

If you are starting in Fes instead

Everything above works in reverse, and Fes is the closer of the two cities to Merzouga.

Two days from Fes will get you to the dunes and back. Three days does it properly, with the cedar forest at Azrou and the Ziz valley on the way down and a full day at the dunes in the middle. And three days is also enough to cross the country completely and finish in Marrakech, which is the same one-way trick described above, run the other way.

The short answer

Two days, and you want to see sand: Zagora.

Three days, and you want the dunes from the photographs: Merzouga, out and back.

Four days: Merzouga one way, Marrakech to Fes or Fes to Marrakech. This is the one we recommend most often, and the one people thank us for afterwards.

Six days: the deep south, slowly. You will talk about the road as much as the dunes.

Whatever you have, tell us your dates and where you land, and we will tell you honestly what fits. If it does not fit, we will say so.