Anti Atlas Mountains

The Anti Atlas Mountains of Southern Morocco is somewhere to visit if you have a yearning for real and intoxicating wilderness.  The harsh but beautiful terrain of this region, with its small towns and villages clinging like patches of lichen to the unforgiving landscape, brings to mind the Old Testament. It’s a deeply rewarding region to explore over a few days, either on foot, supported by mules and a tented camp, or by 4x4 in combination with the desert regions further south.

The Anti Atlas is the southern most range of Mountains in Morocco and stands as a barrier to the Sahara Desert.  The area is characterized by craggy blue topped mountain ridges, harsh red rock deserts, and dramatic valleys like the Draa Valley and the Dades Gorge that separates the Anti Atlas from the Jebel Sahro on the western edge of the range.  The mountains run several hundred miles from close to the Atlantic coast to the northwest where it dovetails into the High Atlas Mountains.

As you’d expect in such a hostile environment, human life is spread thin and - other than the major towns such as Ouarzazate and Taroudant - predominantly limited to small Berber settlements dwarfed by the scale of the landscape.  With their narrow streets lined with small shops these towns have something of the wild west about them, standing in defiance of their harsh environment.  However, the open hospitality of even the smallest settlements never fails to surprise us here and is one of the things that makes time in this part of the country so worth while.  A day or two spent in simple mountain Auberges, perhaps combined with a private tented camp in other areas, is a great way to get off the main drag and still experience some of the Berber culture.