Is it better to base in one city or move around Morocco?

This really comes down to how much time you have and how you like to travel. Basing yourself in one city — almost always Marrakech, occasionally Fes — and doing day trips out has real advantages: you unpack once, settle into a favourite riad and neighbourhood café, and avoid the cumulative tax of packing, checking out and transferring every day or two. For a trip of under a week, travellers with small children, or anyone who finds constant movement exhausting, a single base is often the saner, more relaxing choice.

The honest limitation is that Morocco's day-trip radius from any one city only reaches so far. From Marrakech you can comfortably do the Atlas foothills, Essaouira, the Ourika Valley and the Ouzoud waterfalls as day trips — but the Sahara is not a day trip. The real desert at Merzouga is two long days of driving each way, so trying to day-trip it means a brutal, rushed version that misses the whole magic. Staying put means accepting you'll see one region well and skip the rest.

Moving around is how you actually experience Morocco's headline variety — and that variety is the country's whole selling point. A classic week-plus loop might run Marrakech, over the Atlas to the Sahara for a desert night, up through the gorges and valleys to Fes, and back. You see desert, mountain, medieval city and modern city in one trip, and the overland journeys between them — the changing landscape, the kasbahs, the roadside stops — are often travellers' favourite, unphotographable memories.

So base in one place if you have only three or four days, are travelling with very young kids, or simply want a low-effort, settle-in city break — Marrakech is ideal for that. Move around if you have a week or more and want the desert, the mountains and more than one city, which is what most people come to Morocco for. My one piece of advice if you do move: don't over-pack the route. Two nights minimum per stop, sensible drive lengths, and a private driver so the transfers become part of the trip rather than a chore — that's the pacing that keeps movement rewarding rather than exhausting.