Does GPS and Google Maps work in Morocco?

Good news for the digitally dependent: Google Maps works genuinely well in Morocco. The road network is well mapped, turn-by-turn navigation is reliable in and between the cities, and live traffic data exists in the bigger urban areas. Pick up a local SIM (Maroc Telecom, Orange or inwi) at the airport for a few dirhams, or arrange an eSIM before you fly, and you'll have data on virtually every main road and town.

The one habit I insist on is downloading offline maps before you leave wifi. Google Maps lets you save whole regions for offline use, and you want that for two reasons: mobile signal genuinely drops out in the deep desert around Merzouga and M'Hamid and on the high Atlas passes, and you don't want to be navigation-blind in exactly the remote places where a wrong turn matters most. Save the whole south of the country to your phone the night before you head down.

A real caveat: Google Maps occasionally gets over-confident and routes you down a 'shortcut' that turns out to be an unpaved piste, a riverbed crossing, or a track that needs a 4x4. I've had clients sent onto genuinely unsuitable roads in an economy hire car. If the road ahead looks rougher than the route deserves, trust your eyes over the screen, turn around, and take the longer tarmac road. For desert and off-road, don't navigate by phone alone.

Some travellers also like Waze (popular and accurate in the cities) or maps.me as an offline backup. Whatever you use, keep a phone mount and a car charger — the combination of navigation, a long drive and patchy charging will flatten a battery fast, and a dead phone in the pre-desert is a problem.

For the parts of the trip where the map turns to 'track', this is once again where local knowledge beats any app. Drivers and desert guides navigate by landmark, sun and experience precisely because GPS thins out and the 'roads' aren't roads. On tarmac, drive with Google Maps confidently; off it, defer to someone who actually knows the way.