Mirleft

For a long time the only way in was a narrow, bent, broken-up road under gnarled argan trees, and the village kept its shape: lime-washed houses on a clifftop between the first hills of the Anti-Atlas and the Atlantic. There is one arcaded main street, a souk on Mondays, and a ruin on the hill to the south. Below the cliffs the beaches and coves run in both directions, and in summer they take the overflow from Agadir, an hour and a half up the road.

This is a young village with an odd history. The Berber name translates as prince of turnips, and the story attached to it has nomads passing through to buy turnips of fifteen kilos, known across the region for their size and their taste, out of the wadi that still comes down onto the sand. The village itself dates from the colonial period, when control of Morocco was split between France and Spain, and a beach a few kilometres away served as the line between the two. The ruined military post on the hill went up in 1935 and belongs to that arrangement; the track to it is now where people go for a late-day view down the coast. Sidi Ifni, thirty kilometres south, was the Spanish side and still shows it, in a seafront promenade and public gardens with an Andalusian flavour.