Morocco
Skoura
Water runs beneath twenty-five square kilometres of palms and a kasbah still occupied by its family.
From the road, Skoura is a dark green cloud laid across dry country, with kasbah towers appearing between palms as you move. Under the canopy, open canals run off the Dadès and Hajjaj past olives, almonds and figs planted in each other's shade. The oasis works because the water still follows paths nobody has had to redesign.
Kasbah Amridil occupies a seventeenth-century ksar, but the present four-storey tighremt was built in the late nineteenth century. Local accounts say Madani El Glaoui commissioned it for M'hamed Ben Brahim Nasiri, the faqih whose family taught the Glaoui sons; his descendants still own and partly occupy it. Part of the residence is a museum now, with woven reed ceilings, old farm tools and an oil press, and the terraces look out over the whole palmery. The regular square plan, four corner towers and unusual height distinguish it from many neighbouring kasbahs. It appeared on the old fifty-dirham note and remains partly restored, with the living family presence making its continuity more than an architectural claim.
Couple
Book within the palmery, away from the road, and give the first evening to the terraces at Amridil, which look over the whole of it. Early spring adds the almond blossom, and the Valley of Roses is fifty kilometres east if you want to follow the flowering.
Solo
The paths through the palmery are public and you can walk them alone, though the sensible advice is to take a guide the first time, both for the irrigation and for not getting lost in it. Local outfits rent bikes, including electric ones, which is the honest way to cover twenty-five square kilometres.
- The original ksar is seventeenth-century, while today's four-storey tighremt was built in the late nineteenth century for M'hamed Ben Brahim Nasiri.
- The palmery covers nearly twenty-five square kilometres and is part of the Biosphere Reserve of the Oases of Southern Morocco.
- Date palms, olives, almonds and figs grow in each other's shade, watered by open canals off the Dadès and Hajjaj wadis.
- Local tradition takes the name from the Amazigh word for partridge, after a bird that once lived in the country around.
Chicken tagine brightened with salty olives and wedges of preserved lemon at a palmery lodge.
Pomegranate salad followed by orange-blossom pudding at L'ma Lodge, made from its own garden fruit.
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