Introduction
Souss-Massa runs from the Atlantic through a broad agricultural valley to the Anti-Atlas, and while almost every visitor arrives for the coast, the region's most distinctive places are all inland — a walled town with intact ramparts, a silversmiths' town, and a mountain landscape of pink granite that looks like nowhere else in Morocco.
Overview
The region has three parts and they are easy to tell apart. The coast holds the resort city and the surf villages north of it, and is where the visitors are. Behind it the Souss valley runs inland — flat, intensively farmed, hot, and covered in the argan woodland that grows here and effectively nowhere else on earth. Behind that again the ground rises into the Anti-Atlas, an older, drier, lower range than the High Atlas, built of granite and quartzite and eroded into rounded boulder fields, palm gorges and villages of stone houses that look grown rather than built. The interior towns are the region's secret: a seventeenth-century walled market town in the valley whose ramparts you can circuit in an hour, a compact silver-working town near the coast, and, up in the mountains, a village that is the centre of a landscape people travel a long way to see and almost nobody has heard of. This is the part of Morocco to come to if you have already done the famous circuit.
Discover Souss-Massa
Taroudant sits in the middle of the Souss valley behind a complete circuit of red earthen ramparts, several kilometres of them, and it is frequently described as a smaller and older version of Marrakech — a comparison that is useful up to a point and misleading after it. The walls are the real thing and you can walk or ride a horse cart the whole way round, with the High Atlas rising behind them to the north and the Anti-Atlas to the south. Inside, two souks sell to the town rather than to visitors: one for produce and household goods, one for craft and jewellery, and the selling is markedly gentler than in the tourist cities because most of the customers live there. It is a working agricultural market town that happens to be walled, and it is the single best place in the region to spend a day doing nothing in particular.
Ways to Experience This Destination
A working agricultural market town inside several kilometres of intact earthen ramparts, with souks that sell mainly to residents.
Ancient pink granite boulder country with palm gorges, stone villages, rock art and almond blossom at the end of winter.
A walled town that is the country's centre for Amazigh silverwork, and a cliff-top coastal town of 1930s Spanish deco architecture.
A biosphere-protected tree that grows almost nowhere else, and a coastal park holding one of the last wild bald ibis populations.
Practical Souss-Massa travel notes
- The region's interest is inland. Most visitors never leave the coast, and the walled town, the silver town and the Anti-Atlas are what the region is actually for.
- There is no railway anywhere in this region — the airport is the gateway and everything beyond it is coach, shared taxi or hire car.
- The Anti-Atlas rewards having your own vehicle, because the point of the mountain roads is being able to stop on them.
- Almond blossom in the mountains falls at the end of winter and moves with the season rather than the calendar. Check locally rather than booking around a fixed date.
- Goats in argan trees are real, but the ones beside the main tourist roads are usually placed there and a fee will be requested for photographs.
- The coast stays mild all year and works as a winter beach destination; the inland valley is severe in high summer.
Frequently asked questions
This overview comes from Visaja's worldwide missions database (visaja.com), checked against official government sources; for binding answers, the mission itself always has the final word.