Taroudant

Taroudant is one of the oldest towns of the Souss, established on the plain between the High Atlas and the Anti-Atlas where the valley's farmland and the routes to the Sahara meet. It was taken by the Almoravids in 1056 as they extended their power northwards, and for long periods afterwards the Souss was governed from here rather than from the imperial cities, which lay beyond the mountains and were often at odds with it.

Its most important period came in the early 16th century, when the Saadians rose in the Drâa and the Souss and used Taroudant as an early base before they took Marrakesh and then the rest of Morocco. Sugar cane grown in the valley and refined nearby was exported to Europe, and the town grew rich on that trade. The ramparts that define it today were largely built and rebuilt in the Saadian and Alaouite periods, and the kasbah quarter belongs to that military history.

Later centuries were harder. Taroudant repeatedly resisted the authority of sultans in Marrakesh and Meknes and was besieged and punished for it, the sugar trade collapsed, and the town shrank inside its walls. Ahmed al-Hiba made the town the centre of his resistance to the French protectorate in 1912, and French troops established control over it only in 1917. Independence brought roads, irrigation and the growth of Agadir as the region's economic centre, and Taroudant settled into its role as the market and administrative town of a large agricultural province.

This is the heartland of the Chleuh, the Tashelhit-speaking Amazigh of south-western Morocco, and the language is heard in the souks as much as Arabic. Soussi identity is bound up with trade — families from these valleys run grocery shops across Morocco and in France — and with a reputation for thrift, hard work and long absences from home followed by returns for weddings and feasts.

Musically the region belongs to its professional Amazigh poet-singers, who travel with a one-stringed fiddle and a lute and perform sung poetry that can last for hours, and to ahwash, the collective dance in which two large groups, usually men and women, answer each other in song, poetry and drumming on frame drums. Weddings and moussems in the surrounding countryside are where both are heard properly.

Craft is practical rather than ornamental: chunky Amazigh silver jewellery with enamel and amber, brought in from Tiznit and the Anti-Atlas, leather from the tanneries, woven baskets and palm-fibre matting, and stone and pottery from the valleys. Manners are formal and unhurried, with long greetings and repeated enquiries about family. Taroudant sees far fewer foreign visitors than Marrakesh, and the atmosphere in the markets is correspondingly calmer, with prices that still need negotiating but less pressure to buy.

About 80,000 people lived in the town at the 2014 census, with many more in the villages and small towns of the surrounding province. The Souss plain around it is one of Morocco's most productive agricultural areas: citrus, especially oranges, market vegetables under plastic greenhouses, olives, almonds and argan. Packing houses, transport and seasonal farm labour employ many, and a good deal of the crop leaves for Europe through Agadir.

Water is the central problem. The greenhouses and orchards draw on groundwater that successive dry years have not replenished, wells are drilled deeper, and villages upstream in both mountain ranges have seen springs fail. Migration follows: to Agadir and Casablanca for work, and abroad to France, Belgium and the Netherlands, with remittances visible in new houses on the edge of town.

Inside the walls life runs at a market town's pace. Shops open early, the souks are busiest in the morning and again after the late-afternoon prayer, and the middle of the day in summer belongs to shade and closed shutters. Place Assarag fills in the evening with families, and the weekly souk brings in farmers, livestock and crowds from the countryside. The town is a provincial capital, so administration, schools and a hospital add a public-sector workforce to the farming economy.

The Souss is argan country, and the oil defines the local table. Pressed from the kernels of a tree that grows nowhere else in such numbers, it is nutty and deep gold, drizzled over bread or couscous, and turned into amlou, the almond and honey paste eaten at breakfast. Cooperatives around Taroudant, many run by women, sell both, alongside almonds and honey from the mountains.

Everyday cooking is tagine: chicken with preserved lemon and olives, lamb with prunes or quince, or vegetables from the valley slow-cooked over charcoal. Couscous, often rolled from barley in country households, is the Friday meal, and harira soup, thick with chickpeas, lentils and tomato, is eaten in the evening and through Ramadan. Grills serve brochettes and merguez, and tanjia and mechoui appear at celebrations.

The valley's produce shapes the rest: oranges and clementines pressed into juice at every café, olives cured in a dozen ways, dates from the oases to the east, and saffron from Taliouine, which flavours tagines, pastries and tea. Bread — round khobz, flaky msemen, spongy baghrir — accompanies everything, and mint tea is poured at any hour. Fish from Agadir reaches the market fresh, and grilled sardines are common on the coast road.