Tafraout

Tafraout sits at about a thousand metres inside a ring of pink granite that changes colour through the day and does most of its work at dawn and dusk. The valley floor below is almond and argan and palm, and for a few weeks in February and March it goes white with blossom. A few kilometres out, in open ground south of Aguerd Oudad, some of that granite is blue.

The blue is a land-art work from 1984, about three tonnes of paint spread over somewhere between four and ten hectares, and remains visible from the Tiznit approach road. What happened next is the part that gets left out. The colours weathered, and the head of a paint company from Aday, the next village along, had the rocks redone, painted more of them, enlarged the site, added colours and planted fruit trees. North of town the Ameln Valley runs under Jbel Lekst with about twenty Berber villages in it, palm groves and almond fields between them, and a traditional house at Oumesnat that visitors can go into. The same granite has made this a climbing town, hundreds of walls and boulders in the Anti-Atlas, best between October and May, which is also when the nights are cold.