What are the best day trips from Azrou and Ifrane?

This corner of the Middle Atlas surprises everyone — it’s green, cool, and forested, nothing like the Morocco of the brochures. The headline trip from Azrou is the cedar forest of Gouraud, just 15 to 20 minutes up the road, home to the famous Barbary macaques. These monkeys gather near the giant cedars and are entirely used to people. A quick, important word: please don’t feed them. Human food makes them sick and aggressive, and a good guide will keep you at a respectful distance. The cedars themselves — some centuries old, including the much-photographed "Cedre Gouraud" — are magnificent in their own right.

Ifrane, about 15 minutes from Azrou, is the oddity people can’t quite believe: a town the French built in the 1930s to look like an Alpine village, all pitched red roofs and tidy gardens, nicknamed "little Switzerland." It snows here in winter and there’s a small ski station at Michlifen nearby. You go to walk the spotless streets, photograph the stone lion sculpture, and enjoy a coffee in a setting that feels transported from the Alps. It’s touristy in a wholesome, very Moroccan-holiday way.

For nature without the monkeys, the lakes around Ifrane — Dayet Aoua chief among them — are lovely for a quiet walk or picnic, with birdlife on the water and forest all around. The Source Vittel and other springs add cool, shaded stops. This is picnic-and-stroll country, ideal for families and for anyone who wants a break from the heat of the south.

A little further, about 30 minutes south of Azrou, Ain Leuh is a Berber village known for its spring and seasonal waterfalls, set among more cedar forest. It sees few foreign visitors and gives you a glimpse of ordinary Middle Atlas life. Most people pass through Azrou and Ifrane in a rush between Fes and the desert, but if you give the region a full day, the cedars, the macaques and the alpine air make it one of Morocco’s gentlest pleasures.