Draa Valley Drive

The road from Zagora to M'Hamid follows the Draa Valley for its entire length, and the drive itself is one of the finest in Morocco. The river corridor sustains a chain of palm oases — long, green ribbons in the brown landscape — punctuated by villages of pink mud-brick, crumbling kasbahs built to defend the date palms from raiding parties, and ksour (fortified granaries) that look exactly as they did three centuries ago.

The best approach is to take your time over this 100-kilometre stretch rather than rushing through. Stop at Tamegroute, a village known for its distinctive green-glazed pottery and an ancient Koranic library. Stop at the Jebel Zagora outlook, where a famous sign marks 52 days to Timbuktu by camel — a reminder that this road was once a major trans-Saharan trade route.

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The Draa is Morocco's longest river, running about 1,100 kilometres from the High Atlas to the Atlantic. But it rarely reaches the sea. South of M'Hamid, the water disappears into the sand, absorbed by the desert before it can cross into Mauritania. In particularly wet years — perhaps once a decade — the Draa flows all the way to the sea for the first time in decades, flooding villages and shocking locals who have never seen the river run.

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