Ouarzazate

The site is an old crossing point rather than an old city: the routes from the Drâa and the Sahara to the passes of the High Atlas meet where the Ouarzazate and Dadès rivers join to form the Drâa. Earthen ksour and kasbahs have stood here for centuries, and the one that mattered was Taourirt, which in the 19th century came into the hands of the Glaoua, an Amazigh clan from Telouet on the caravan road north. Under Thami El Glaoui, who rose to be pasha of Marrakesh under the French protectorate and controlled much of the south through kasbahs such as this one, Taourirt was enlarged into a rambling palace.

The modern town grew in the French period, expanding considerably as a garrison town, administrative centre and customs post: a military airfield was laid out in 1928 and a church built in 1931, beside the older kasbah. The Glaoui's power ended with independence in 1956, and Ouarzazate remained a small provincial capital, its life turning on the army base, the administration and the irrigated gardens along the river; the El Mansour Eddahbi dam, built between 1972 and 1979, regulated the Drâa downstream and watered the valley.

Two things reshaped it after that. Film-makers had used the surrounding desert and kasbahs since Lawrence of Arabia in 1962, and studios followed: Atlas Studios in 1983 and CLA Studios in 2004, giving the town a long line of work as sets, crews and extras for productions set in ancient Egypt, Rome, Tibet and the Levant. Then the Noor complex of solar plants, one of the largest of its kind in the world, rose on the stony plain to the north-east and was connected to the national grid in February 2016, bringing engineers, technicians and a new kind of visitor to a town that had lived on soldiers and film crews. In November 2023 Ouarzazate joined UNESCO's Creative Cities Network.

Ouarzazate is a Tamazight-speaking town in a province of Amazigh valleys, and the culture of the surrounding countryside — the ahwach line dances of drums and massed voices, the ahidous of the mountain villages, and the Gnawa music carried up from the Sahel along the caravan roads — is the living tradition, performed at weddings and moussems rather than in theatres. Arabic and French do the work of administration; Tamazight is the language of the street and the market.

The kasbah tradition defines the region's craft: rammed earth and mud brick, mixed with straw and laid in thick walls that keep rooms cool, decorated with geometric brickwork and carved cedar. Restoring these buildings is a constant, expensive effort, because rain and neglect turn them back into the ground they came from within a generation. Carpet cooperatives in and around the old quarter weave the flat-woven and knotted rugs of the surrounding valleys.

Film has become part of local identity too. Generations of families have worked as extras, carpenters, drivers and set builders, and the standing sets on the edge of town are shown off with some pride. Manners are those of a small southern town: formal greetings, hospitality offered quickly, modest dress, and a life that is lived indoors or in shade through the middle of the day.

Ouarzazate recorded 71,067 people at the 2014 census. It is one of the main towns of the Drâa-Tafilalet region and the capital of its own province. It is a young population, and many households depend on work that is seasonal or intermittent: tourism, film production, the army and the administration, construction, and the gardens and palm groves along the river.

The solar complex outside town brought construction jobs and, later, a smaller number of technical ones, along with better roads and a higher profile. Tourism is the steadier employer, since almost every visitor crossing between Marrakesh and the desert passes through, and the hotels, guides, drivers and craft shops live on that traffic; the town empties noticeably when the season turns or when travel to Morocco slows.

Water is the defining constraint. Successive dry years have reduced the flow of the Drâa and the reservoir behind the dam, shrinking the palm groves downstream and pushing farming families towards the towns. Days are organised around the heat: early starts, a long closed period in the afternoon, and the avenue busy again from dusk until late, when families walk, children play and cafés fill.

The cooking is that of the southern oases, simple and slow. Tagines of lamb, goat or chicken are cooked over charcoal with carrots, potato, olives and preserved lemon, or with prunes, almonds and dates from the Drâa; the Berber tagine of mixed seasonal vegetables is the everyday version. Couscous, often made from barley rather than wheat in the south, is the Friday dish, steamed over a broth of meat and vegetables.

Bread is baked daily and eaten with everything — round khobz, the semolina griddle cake harsha at breakfast, flaky msemen with honey or argan oil, and the spongy baghrir. Harira, a soup of tomato, lentils and chickpeas, is eaten in the evening, and at any time in Ramadan. Further east and south the speciality is medfouna, a stuffed flatbread of minced meat, onion and spices baked in the sand and sometimes called a Berber pizza, which appears on menus here as well.

Dates are the local product that matters most, sold by variety in the market and offered with tea, alongside almonds, walnuts and mountain honey. Mint tea, poured from height into small glasses and drunk very sweet, marks every meeting and every sale; coffee and fresh orange juice fill the cafés on the main avenue.