How do I buy a Moroccan rug (and not get ripped off)?

Buying a rug is the one purchase I tell guests to slow down for, because it's the one with the biggest gap between a great buy and a tourist-trap markup. The first thing I do in any rug shop is flip the rug over. A genuine hand-knotted rug shows the design clearly on the back, with thousands of small, slightly uneven knots — the irregularity is the proof a human made it. If the back looks like a printed photo or the knots are machine-perfect, it's woven or machine-made and worth a fraction of the price.

Next, the fibre. Real wool feels warm, slightly greasy with natural lanolin, and springs back when you crush it; synthetic or 'wool-blend' feels cool, squeaky and a bit plasticky. Ask them to do the burn test on a single tuft from the fringe — real wool smells like burnt hair and crumbles to ash, synthetic melts into a hard plastic bead. Knot count matters too: more knots per square centimetre means finer, more durable, and more expensive. A flatweave kilim (no pile) is a different, usually cheaper category — lovely, but don't pay knotted-pile prices for it.

Now the dance. The first price you hear is theatre — for a tourist it's often three to four times what they'll actually take. I open at around 30–40% of the asking number, smile, and never act like I love it (the moment you're visibly in love, the price stops falling). Mint tea will appear; drink it, it doesn't obligate you to buy. They'll roll out twenty rugs 'just to show you' — that's normal hospitality, not pressure. Negotiate slowly, name a real ceiling, and when you reach it, mean it. Walking out genuinely works: I've been called back to the door more times than I can count, and the price that follows you down the alley is the real one.

A medium hand-knotted wool rug (roughly 1.5 x 2m) honestly lands somewhere around 1,500–4,000 MAD depending on knot density, age and how well you bargain; big, fine, or genuinely old pieces go far higher and that can be fair. Buy what you love and what you can carry the memory of — not what someone insists is a 'museum antique', because almost none of them are. Get the shop to ship anything large (most reputable ones do, by DHL or their own forwarder), keep the receipt, and photograph the rug before it leaves the shop.