Erfoud: A Gentle Base at the Edge of the Sahara

Almost everyone passes through Erfoud. It sits on the last stretch of tarmac before the great dunes of Erg Chebbi, so coaches pull in at midday, travellers eat a tagine, buy a polished fossil, and are gone by two o'clock. The town waves them off without complaint and goes back to its own rhythm.

We think that is a small mistake. Erfoud is a low, flat, unhurried place of about thirty thousand people in the Drâa-Tafilalet region, built at roughly 800 metres on the edge of the Tafilalet palm groves where the Ziz river finally loses itself in the sand. There are no hills to climb here, no medina maze to get lost in, no crowds. There are date palms, wide arcaded streets, workshops full of 400-million-year-old sea creatures, and some of the best light in Morocco.

For travellers over 60, that combination is a gift. Erfoud is somewhere you can stay still, sleep well, and let the desert come to you — a day at a time, at your own pace.

A little history

Erfoud is young by Moroccan standards. While nearby Rissani and the ruins of Sijilmassa go back more than a thousand years, Erfoud itself grew in the early twentieth century, during the French protectorate, as an administrative and military post watching over the tribes of the Tafilalet. That origin explains the town's shape: straight streets on a grid, long arcades for shade, a tidy central square — unusual in a country of winding medinas, and very easy to walk.

The town also has a quieter history. Erfoud had a substantial Jewish community for much of the twentieth century — by the 1930s roughly a third of its inhabitants — and it is associated with the Abuhatzeira family of rabbis, still remembered by pilgrims today. Most of that community left for Israel after Moroccan independence in 1956.

In recent decades Erfoud found a third life: as a film base. The desert around the town has stood in for ancient Egypt and other imagined lands in productions including The Mummy, Prince of Persia and the James Bond film Spectre. In 2013 the Austrian Space Forum even used the stony plains nearby to rehearse missions to Mars. Sit on a hotel terrace at dusk and you will understand why: the horizon here looks like another planet.

The town hall in Erfoud, on the grid of straight, arcaded streets laid out in the early twentieth century.

A town built on an ancient seabed

Erfoud's real speciality is older than any dynasty. Several hundred million years ago this part of the Sahara lay under a warm sea, and the rock around the town is dense with marine fossils from the Devonian period: straight-shelled orthoceras, coiled shells, and the trilobites that collectors prize.

On the outskirts of town, family workshops saw that fossil-bearing limestone into slabs and polish it until the creatures appear like ink drawings on black stone. The results become table tops, washbasins, fountains, bowls and small pendants. Several workshops welcome visitors, show you the cutting and polishing, and sell directly; there is also a fossil and mineral collection in town for those who want the geology explained.

A word of honesty. Genuine specimens are abundant here, but so are composites and improved pieces, especially among the trilobites sold at roadside stalls. If a fossil matters to you, buy from a workshop where you can watch the work being done, ask plainly what has been restored, and expect to haggle gently. If it is simply a souvenir, a small polished orthoceras is light, inexpensive and completely charming — and far easier to carry home than a basin.

A fossil shop on the road outside Erfoud, where local limestone is cut and polished.

What to see

Erfoud is not a town of monuments. It is a town of three or four good experiences, each short and each easy.

Borj Est, for the view

East of town a dark hill called Borj Est rises above the oasis, and the track to the top is the classic Erfoud outing. From up there you see the whole geography of the place at once: the pale town, the green ribbon of palms along the Ziz, the stony hammada beyond, and on a clear evening the faint apricot line of the Erg Chebbi dunes far to the south-east. The track is rough, so go with a local driver rather than a low hire car — and go an hour before sunset.

The Saturday souk

Erfoud's weekly market, held near the river on Saturday mornings, is a working country souk rather than a tourist bazaar: vegetables, mint, spices, blankets, turbans, tools, livestock, and mountains of dates in autumn. It is flat, lively and mercifully compact. Go early, when it is cool and the shade is still long.

The palm groves and the ksour

The Tafilalet palmeraie around Erfoud is one of the largest oases in Morocco, watered for centuries by hand-dug channels. A slow drive or a short walk along its edge in the late afternoon — past earthen walls, irrigation ditches and the ochre ksour, the fortified villages of the valley — is one of the gentlest pleasures in the south.

The date festival

If you are here in October, ask about the moussem of dates, Erfoud's annual harvest festival, with music, dancing and the pride of a town that grows dozens of varieties. Dates are the reason Erfoud exists at all.

Sunset seen from the top of Borj Est hill, above Erfoud.

A day trip nearby

Two excursions make Erfoud worth a second night.

Rissani, about 20 km south, is a 30-minute drive and feels a thousand years older. Its souk — traditionally held on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays — is one of the most atmospheric in Morocco, complete with a donkey car park. Nearby stand the handsome earthen walls of Ksar Oulad Abdelhalim, the low ruins of Sijilmassa, the medieval caravan city that traded gold and salt across the Sahara from the eighth century onwards, and the mausoleum of Moulay Ali Cherif, ancestor of Morocco's ruling Alaouite dynasty. Visitors who are not Muslim cannot enter the tomb chamber itself, but the outer courtyard is usually open and the setting is lovely.

Erg Chebbi, the famous dune sea, lies roughly 50–60 km away — about an hour by road, with the last stretch across flat desert. You do not have to ride a camel to see it. Ask your hotel to arrange a 4x4 that drops you at the foot of the dunes for sunset, where a short walk of a few metres onto the sand is enough for the view that brought you to Morocco. Many desert camps near Merzouga are now reachable by vehicle rather than only by camel; say clearly what you want when you book.

The road leading out of Erfoud towards the fossil quarries and, further on, the Erg Chebbi dunes.

Honest advice for comfortable travel

• Avoid high summer. From June to early September daytime temperatures here routinely reach the high 30s and above 40°C. It is a dry heat, but it is genuinely punishing. October to April is the comfortable window.
• Pack for cold nights. Desert winters are mild by day and sharply cold after dark, especially at a dune camp. A fleece, a warm layer and socks for the night are not luxuries.
• Expect wind and dust in spring. Sand-laden winds can blow for a day or two, flattening the light and grinding at the eyes. Sunglasses, a light scarf and eye drops solve most of it; so does a book and an unhurried afternoon.
• The town is flat — the surfaces are not. There are no hills or stairs to speak of in Erfoud, which is a real advantage, but pavements are uneven, kerbs are high and shade is patchy. Sturdy shoes and a walking stick help more than you would expect.
• Choose a hotel with a garden, a pool and ground-floor rooms. Erfoud's larger hotels sit on the edges of town with shaded courtyards — ideal for the long, hot middle of the day. Ask for a ground-floor room; lifts are not a given.
• Break the long drives. Erfoud is far from everywhere. Treat Fes–Erfoud or Marrakech–Erfoud as a full day, split it with a night in Midelt, the Dadès or Ouarzazate, and ask your driver for a stop every 90 minutes or so.
• Camel riding is optional and not gentle. Mounting and dismounting means a long step and a lurch. There is no shame at all in taking the 4x4 and meeting the sunset standing up.
• Carry cash and water. There are ATMs and pharmacies in Erfoud, but cards are not widely accepted in souks and small restaurants. The nearest larger hospital is in Errachidia, roughly an hour to an hour and a half north.

What to eat

The dish to seek out is madfouna, often sold to visitors as Berber pizza: a round of dough stuffed with minced meat, onion, parsley, almonds and warm spices, sealed and baked until the crust blisters. The name means "buried", from the old practice of cooking it in hot ash. It arrives at the table as a wheel, cut in wedges, and one between two people is plenty. It is soft, mild and very easy on the digestion — a good friend to anyone who has had enough of tagines.

And there are the dates. The Tafilalet is one of Morocco's great date-growing regions, and autumn, after the harvest, is the moment to taste them properly: large, honeyed Mejhoul and smaller, drier Boufeggous, sold loose by the kilo in the souk. Buy a modest bag, eat them with mint tea, and take the rest home.

Otherwise expect what the oasis gives: lamb or chicken tagine with vegetables, lentil and bean soups, flatbread baked that morning, oranges and melon, and the occasional pizzeria for a change of pace. Drink more water than you think you need, and accept every glass of mint tea you are offered — in Erfoud it is a conversation, not a drink.

Erfoud's market on a Saturday morning, where local produce and dates are sold.

Getting there

Our verdict

Erfoud will never be the headline of a Moroccan holiday — the dunes will always win that argument. But as a base it is close to ideal for travellers who want the Sahara without the strain: flat streets, comfortable hotels with gardens, short and genuinely interesting outings, and a town that is too busy growing dates to perform for anyone.

Give it two nights. Spend the first evening on Borj Est watching the palm groves turn gold, the next morning in the souk, the afternoon in a fossil workshop learning that this desert was once a sea, and the following evening at the edge of Erg Chebhi — sorry, Erg Chebbi — with your feet in the sand and nothing at all to do. It is one of the calmest, kindest introductions to the Moroccan desert we know.

“In Erfoud the desert hands you two gifts: a date still warm from the sun, and a sea that dried up four hundred million years ago.”

Photo credits

• Eastwards towards Erfoud - Flickr - gailhampshire: gailhampshire from Cradley, Malvern, U.K, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• Erfoud-Town-Hall: Joaoleitao talk . Original uploader was Joaoleitao at Wikitravel Joaoleitao, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• Fossil-Shop-Erfoud-Morocco: Joaoleitao talk . Original uploader was Joaoleitao at Wikitravel Joaoleitao, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• Sunset-Erfoud-Morocco: Joaoleitao talk . Original uploader was Joaoleitao at Wikitravel Joaoleitao, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• Road-Erfoud-Morocco: Joaoleitao talk . Original uploader was Joaoleitao at Wikitravel Joaoleitao, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• Erfoud-Souq-Market-Sahara-Morocco: Joaoleitao talk . Original uploader was Joaoleitao at Wikitravel Joaoleitao, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons