Drâa-Tafilalet

The region's kasbahs and ksour — fortified houses and fortified villages — are built of rammed earth and mud brick, materials taken from the ground they stand on, and understanding that explains almost everything a visitor notices about them. The technique is superbly suited to the climate: thick earth walls keep interiors cool through forty-degree days and warm through freezing nights, at no running cost. What it is not is durable without attention. Earth needs re-rendering after heavy rain and continuous small repair, and a building left alone for a decade begins to slump back into the ground it came from. That is why the valleys are full of structures in every state from immaculately maintained to melting, often side by side, and why apparent dereliction is not neglect so much as an ongoing negotiation. Where families moved to concrete houses nearby, the old ksar was not abandoned out of carelessness but because concrete does not need re-rendering every year. Some are now being restored, and the craft of doing it properly is itself becoming a heritage skill.

The palm groves are working agricultural land, not scenery, and they run on an irrigation system of channels and allocated water turns that in places is centuries old and still collectively managed. Under the palms grow fruit trees, and under those, cereals and vegetables — a three-storey arrangement that makes intensive use of the shade and the water, and which is far more sophisticated than it looks from a car window. Dates are the cash crop, and the region produces varieties that are prized nationally and priced accordingly. The autumn harvest is the year's event, and the market towns are at their busiest and most interesting during it. A walk into a palmery with someone who farms it is one of the most rewarding hours available in southern Morocco and one of the least requested.

Ouarzazate has been a production centre for decades, and the reason is practical rather than glamorous: reliable sun, a range of landscapes within short drives, standing sets that can be re-dressed, and skilled local crews who have done this for two generations. Large studios operate on the edge of town and open parts of their lots to visitors, and the region's earth architecture has stood in for a long list of places it is not. What matters locally is that this is employment — set construction, crewing, extras, transport, catering — in a region with limited alternatives, and it is one of the few places in Morocco where a visitor's sense of a town is genuinely shaped by an industry rather than by tourism. Worth an afternoon, and worth knowing that the sets are working infrastructure that periodically closes.

On the region's northern edge, two river valleys cut back into the mountains and are worth more than the photo stop most itineraries allow. The narrower one is a limestone slot where the walls close to a few tens of metres apart and rise several hundred straight up, with a stream and a road along the floor — it has become one of North Africa's better-known rock-climbing destinations, with routes on the walls above the road and a small ecosystem of guides and guesthouses. The broader one winds up through eroded red rock formations in a series of famous hairpin bends, and it is walking rather than climbing country, with valley paths between villages and simple accommodation along them. Both reward an overnight. Staying in either puts you in a valley after the day visitors have left, which is when they are at their best.

The region is usually given a single night in a desert camp and treated as a corridor otherwise, which is the main reason people describe it as a long drive. Three or four days changes the experience completely. A workable shape is a night in the gorge country, a night in the palm valley, and one or two at the dunes — which turns the same distance into a series of stays rather than a single push. Choosing between the two dune fields, and what a night in a camp actually involves, are the subject of the Sahara guide. Accommodation across the region runs from simple guesthouses in the valleys to converted kasbahs and desert camps at every level of comfort, and the valley guesthouses in particular are frequently family-run and offer the kind of evening that a camp cannot. Confirm current rates directly, since they vary widely by season and standard.

This region is more extreme than anywhere else on a standard Moroccan itinerary and its calendar reflects that. Spring and autumn are the comfortable windows and the autumn one has the date harvest in it. Summer is genuinely severe — daytime temperatures well past forty are routine, and midday is not a time to be outdoors — while winter days are clear, mild and superb for walking, with nights that drop to freezing in the valleys and below it on the sand. The one weather event worth planning around is rain: it is rare, but the rivers here are seasonal and a heavy storm in the mountains can flood a valley road with very little notice, so check conditions before committing to a remote route after bad weather upstream.