Morocco
Draa Valley
Two and a half million date palms carry a green river towards the Sahara.
South of Ouarzazate the road drops into a green trench and stays in it for hours. The Draa runs somewhere under the palms, mostly out of sight, and the valley floor is one continuous grove broken only by earthen ksour standing back from the water on the dry margin, each one a slightly further stage of collapse than the last.
This is the biggest date operation in the country. The Draa and Saghro palmeries cover 22,700 hectares and hold something like 2.62 million palms, worked by seventy thousand growers, and between them they produce 42,000 tonnes of dates a year, forty per cent of everything Morocco grows. Fourteen packing and cold-storage units sit along the valley to handle it. At Tamgrout, on the way south, a renowned Koranic library keeps manuscripts approaching a thousand years old. Keep going and the palms thin, the ksour space out, and the hamada takes over.
Solo
Drive it slowly and stop at random. The valley does not have a single sight to reach, so the reward comes from pulling over at whichever ksar looks most nearly finished with itself and walking into the palms behind it.
Couple
Take a room inside the palmery rather than in a town. The grove kills the road noise completely and, once the generators go off, the sky over a valley with almost no settlement lighting does the rest.
Family
The drive works as the day out: green trench, earthen towers, a stop at Tamgrout for the library and the potters, then the palms thinning towards the desert so children can watch the landscape change through the window.
- The Draa and Saghro palmeries cover 22,700 hectares and hold about 2.62 million date palms.
- Forty per cent of Morocco's dates come from this valley system, some 42,000 tonnes a year worked by seventy thousand growers.
- Tamgrout holds one of the oldest and best-known Koranic libraries in the country, with manuscripts approaching a thousand years old.
- Two date varieties, black Bousthammi and Jihel, carry protected geographical indications naming the Draa itself.
Black Bousthammi and Jihel dates, both protected under the valley's own name, bought at the roadside where the packing sheds are.
Boufeggous, semi-soft and translucent brown and faintly caramelised, under a tenth of the national crop and losing ground to disease.
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