Azilal

The plateau around Azilal has been Amazigh country for as long as there are records of it, farmed by tribes who held the valleys and the grazing between the Tadla plain and the high peaks. This was frontier land: the sultans in Marrakech and Fez claimed it, but real authority lay with local clans and their assemblies, and tribute was collected only when a column came through. Fortified granaries, built collectively to store grain, oil and documents, still stand in some of the valleys and belong to that unsettled history.

The town itself is modern. Under the French protectorate the mountains here were subdued late, and a military and administrative post was established on the plateau to control the roads between Marrakech, Demnate and Béni Mellal. Around it grew a market centre with offices, a school and a clinic, on ground chosen for its junction of routes rather than for any older settlement. After independence Azilal became the seat of its own province, and the state's presence — administration, schooling, health care — has been the town's main business ever since.

Roads changed everything else. Tarmac reaching Ouzoud, the Bin el Ouidane dam built in the 1950s, and gradual improvements to the mountain routes south opened the province to trade and later to visitors. Azilal grew as families moved down from the valleys, and its population has multiplied several times over since the 1960s. Tourism arrived indirectly: almost no one comes for the town, but a great many pass through it, and guesthouses, guides and transport have grown up around that traffic.

Azilal sits in Central Atlas Tamazight-speaking country, and the town's culture is that of the surrounding mountains brought down to the plateau. Families keep land and relatives in the valleys, return for harvests and festivals, and speak Tamazight at home while using Arabic and French in offices and schools. The Amazigh new year, Yennayer, is marked in January with a special meal, and Tifinagh script appears on public signs alongside Arabic.

Collective dance is the clearest public expression of that identity. Ahidous, performed in a line or circle to frame drums with men and women singing in alternation, accompanies weddings and moussems across the central Atlas, and poetry improvised at such gatherings is taken seriously. Craft traditions of the province include flat-woven rugs, the ornamented wool carpets of the valleys, and silver jewellery worn at celebrations.

Everyday manners are those of a small, conservative Moroccan town. The souk is a social event as much as a market, cafés are male-dominated and busy in the evenings, and hospitality is pressed on guests. Religion is Sunni Islam of the Maliki school with strong local attachments to saints' shrines, whose moussems draw pilgrims and fairs at fixed points in the year. Visitors are rare enough that curiosity, rather than the practised sales talk of Marrakech, is the usual reaction.

Azilal is a small town by Moroccan standards and the administrative centre of a province of scattered mountain communes. Government offices, schools, the hospital and the courts are the largest employers, alongside trade, transport and construction; farming — olives, walnuts, almonds, barley and livestock — supports most households in the countryside around it.

The rhythm of the week turns on the souk, when the town fills with pickups, mules and families down from the valleys, and on the school and office day. Mornings are busy, the middle of the day is quiet, and the avenues fill again in the late afternoon and evening. Younger people gather in cafés and around the shops; many leave for Béni Mellal, Casablanca or Europe for work, and remittances are an important part of local income.

The province's problems are those of rural mountain Morocco: drought and irregular rainfall affecting crops and the reservoirs, roads and tracks that are hard to maintain, distance from hospitals and universities, and steady migration of the young. Tourism at Ouzoud and around the lake brings money to a narrow strip of the province, and there is persistent discussion about how much of it reaches the valleys.

Cooking here is mountain and plateau food, plainer than the cities and built on what the province grows. Tagines of mutton, chicken or vegetables with olives, preserved lemon and cumin are the standard, cooked over charcoal and eaten with round khobz bread. Couscous, steamed above a broth of meat, turnip, carrot, pumpkin and chickpeas, is the Friday and family dish, and in winter thick soups carry households through cold evenings: harira with lentils and chickpeas, and berkoukes, a soup of rolled pasta grains.

Local produce shapes the rest. Walnuts and almonds come down from the valleys, olive oil is pressed around Demnate and Ouzoud, and honey from mountain hives is sold in the souk. Amlou — almonds ground with argan oil and honey — is eaten at breakfast with bread, alongside msemen, the layered griddle bread, and baghrir, the spongy pancake soaked in butter and honey. Fresh goat's and sheep's cheeses appear at the market, and dried meat preserved in fat, khlii, is a mountain staple.

Grilled meat is the town's restaurant food: brochettes and kefta cooked to order over charcoal, served with bread, tomato and onion salad and harissa. Mint tea is drunk throughout the day, often made with wormwood or thyme in winter, and fresh orange juice and almond milk are the usual alternatives. Alcohol plays no part in daily life here.