The 15 Best Things to Do in Morocco (2026)

Morocco packs an unusual amount into a small space. In one week you can sleep in the Sahara, climb above 4,000 m, walk a medieval medina and surf an Atlantic point break. The difficulty is not finding things to do — it is choosing, and knowing which of the famous experiences actually justify the time and money.

This is the list we would give a friend. Fifteen things, grouped by the kind of day they make, with real prices and an honest verdict on each.

Desert and adventure

1. Sleep in the Sahara at Erg Chebbi

The single most requested experience in Morocco, and it deserves the reputation. Erg Chebbi near Merzouga is a genuine sand sea — dunes to 150 m, the colour shifting from apricot to deep orange as the sun drops. You ride a camel over the last ridge, sleep at a camp, and wake for sunrise.

The catch is distance. Merzouga is roughly a day's drive from Marrakech, so this is a three-day trip, not a day trip. Anyone selling you the Sahara from Marrakech in a day is selling you Agafay, which is a different thing entirely.

Cost: from €120 per person on a shared 3-day departure. A private version of the same route is €230 per person at six travellers.

Verdict: do it. If you only have two days, Zagora is the honest substitute — closer, but low scrubby dunes rather than the sand sea from the photographs.

2. An evening in the Agafay stone desert

Forty minutes from Marrakech, Agafay is a lunar landscape of grey hills with the Atlas on the skyline. No dunes — it is a rocky desert, and operators who call it "the desert near Marrakech" are stretching the word. As an evening out, though, it is excellent: camel ride at golden hour, dinner in a camp, fire show, back at your riad by 10:30 pm.

Cost: €30 per person for the shared evening.

Verdict: worth it as an evening, never as a Sahara replacement. Read the Agafay guide before booking, and the three-way comparison if you are choosing between deserts.

3. Climb Jbel Toubkal

At 4,167 m, Toubkal is the highest peak in North Africa, and it is a walk rather than a climb — no ropes, no technical ground, from late spring to autumn. What it does demand is fitness and a head for altitude: 1,500 m of ascent on summit day.

Cost: the 2-day summit trek is the standard route. See how hard Toubkal really is for a straight answer on the difficulty.

Verdict: the best value adventure in Morocco if you are fit. In winter it becomes a mountaineering objective needing crampons and an ice axe — what to expect in winter.

4. Trek between Berber villages in the High Atlas

The quieter alternative to a summit bid, and for many people the better trip. Walking valley to valley — Imlil, Azzaden, Ourika — you stay in village guesthouses, eat with families, and see an agricultural system worked the same way for centuries.

Verdict: choose this over Toubkal if your interest is people and landscape rather than altitude. Start with the best multi-day treks.

5. Surf at Taghazout or Imsouane

Morocco's Atlantic coast has world-class right-hand point breaks, and the water is surfable year-round. Taghazout, north of Agadir, is the hub; Imsouane has one of the longest rides in Africa. Anchor Point works best October to March, when the Atlantic swells arrive.

Verdict: worth building a week around if you surf. Beginners are well served — see the Taghazout surf guide.

Culture and history

6. Jemaa el-Fna and the Marrakech souks

Marrakech's central square is a genuine spectacle after dark: food stalls, musicians, storytellers, crowds. The souks behind it run for kilometres. It is also the most aggressively commercial place in Morocco, and first-timers routinely overpay by three or four times.

Verdict: unmissable, but go with your eyes open. Read haggling in the souks first — it will save you more than the price of a guided walk. A guided medina tour is €31 per person at six and removes the navigation problem entirely.

7. Get lost in the Fes medina

Fes el-Bali is the largest car-free urban area in the world and, unlike Marrakech, it is still primarily a working city rather than a tourist economy. Nine thousand alleys, a ninth-century university, and the Chouara tannery — where hides are still worked in stone vats using a process unchanged since the medieval period.

Verdict: the more authentic of the two great medinas. Take a guide for the first morning; the Fes medina guide explains why.

8. Photograph the blue streets of Chefchaouen

Chefchaouen is genuinely as blue as the photographs, and genuinely small — a morning covers the medina. It sits in the Rif Mountains five hours north of Fes, so it is a real detour, best folded into a route rather than visited as a day trip.

Verdict: worth the detour if your itinerary runs north. See the complete Chefchaouen guide.

9. Aït Benhaddou

The UNESCO-listed ksar of Aït Benhaddou is the most photographed earthen architecture in Morocco, and its film credits — Gladiator, Game of Thrones, Lawrence of Arabia — explain the crowds. It sits directly on the road south, so almost every desert route stops there.

Verdict: you will see it anyway on a Sahara trip. Climb to the top for the view over the Ounila valley. Background in the Aït Benhaddou guide and the film locations piece.

10. Jardin Majorelle in Marrakech

The electric-blue garden built by Jacques Majorelle and later rescued by Yves Saint Laurent. Small, beautiful, and extremely busy — book a timed ticket and go at opening.

Verdict: worth an hour, not a morning. Combine it with the YSL museum next door.

11. Todra Gorge and the Dades valley

A 300 m limestone canyon narrowing to a corridor barely ten metres wide, with a road running through it. The Dades valley nearby has the switchback road that appears on every Morocco poster.

Verdict: you pass both on the standard Marrakech–Merzouga route, which is a strong argument for the three-day desert trip over flying. See the Todra and Dades guides.

Food and wellness

12. Take a tagine cooking class

The most reliably enjoyable half-day in Morocco. You walk the spice souk learning to tell real saffron from dyed safflower, then cook a tagine from scratch with a local family and eat what you made.

Cost: the Marrakech food and market tour is €109 solo and €33 per person at six — the steepest group discount of anything we run.

Verdict: the single best-value cultural experience on this list, and the one people talk about afterwards. Pair it with the food guide, and what you actually learn in a class if you want the detail before booking.

13. A traditional hammam

Morocco's bathhouse ritual: steam, a black-soap scrub with a kessa glove, and a rinse. There are two versions. A hammam beldi is the local public bath — 10–20 MAD, no English, bring your own soap and glove. A tourist hammam costs 150–400 MAD and adds a massage, mint tea and staff who speak English.

Verdict: do it on your last day, after the trekking. The scrub is more thorough than most visitors expect. Details in the Marrakech medina guide.

14. Drink mint tea properly

Not a tourist activity so much as the texture of Moroccan daily life — but the ceremony has real rules, and understanding them changes how you read every interaction. Three glasses, poured from height, each one different.

Verdict: free, and the mint tea guide is a five-minute read that pays off daily.

15. Stay in a riad

A riad is a courtyard house turned inward around a garden or fountain, and staying in one inside the medina walls is a fundamentally different experience from a hotel on the new-town ring road.

Verdict: book at least a couple of nights in one. What is a riad covers what to look for and what the word actually means.

Building these into a trip

Most of the list clusters into three bases. Marrakech covers the souks, Agafay, cooking classes, hammams and the Toubkal trailhead. The Sahara needs three days out and back. The north — Fes and Chefchaouen — is a separate leg.

That is why a week is the practical minimum for a first trip and ten days is comfortable. Our 7-day and 10-day itineraries sequence these properly, and how many days you need is the honest version of that question.

If cost is the deciding factor, the shared departure guide explains where group departures beat private tours and where they do not — the crossover is around four travellers.