Ouzoud Falls

The water arrives at the lip already working. A dozen small mills sit up there, a stone's throw from the edge, still driven by the torrent, and then the whole thing goes over into the oued Tissakht in stages, about a hundred and ten metres of it, down a valley of red sandstone. The spring flow throws a rainbow across the pools that barely moves all day.

A made-up path descends to the foot, and an easy loop of about an hour goes round through the olive groves, over the river and back up the far bank. Small boats rowed by local men take people in under the main fall, and below it the rock is furred with tufa. About a hundred Barbary macaques live in the caves in the cliffs; they come out at dusk into the carob trees, whose fruit they are fond of, and they will take food off a table, which is one reason visitors are asked to watch them rather than feed them. The site is classified for its biodiversity and sits inside the M'Goun Geopark, and the longer paths run on past it, up to the Ouzoud springs or down into the gorges of the oued el-Abid. That last one is the least visited and the most serious: a narrow, difficult track through a canyon where the floor is sometimes out of sight, close to six hundred metres below.