What is Ifrane National Park and where can I see the Barbary macaques?

Ifrane is the park I slot into almost every Fes-to-desert itinerary, because it sits right on the road and rewards a short stop hugely. It protects the cool, high Middle Atlas around the town of Ifrane — a place so green and chalet-built that people nickname it 'Little Switzerland'. The park's crown jewel is its forest of Atlas cedars, ancient and enormous, and it shelters the largest surviving population of Barbary macaques, North Africa's only native monkey.

The reliable spot for the macaques is the cedar forest just outside Azrou, the so-called Cèdre Gouraud forest. Here the monkeys come down close to the road and clearings, and you can watch whole troops grooming, playing and tending their young among the trees. It's one of the easiest genuine wildlife encounters in Morocco — and one of the few where families with young children get a real thrill with no hardship at all.

I do give guests a firm rule, though, and I'll repeat it here: please don't feed them. Tourist feeding has made some troops dependent and aggressive, and a bad diet harms them — these are an endangered species, not a petting zoo. We watch quietly, keep our distance, hold onto bags, and let them be wild. Done that way, it's both magical and responsible, and the park rangers will thank you for it.

Beyond the monkeys, the park has cedar walks, the Dayet Aoua lake (good for birds when it holds water), and crisp mountain air that's a relief in summer. It's an effortless add-on: Azrou is roughly an hour from Fes and directly on the route south to Midelt and the dunes, so I build in a couple of hours among the cedars without adding a day. In winter there can even be snow, which delights desert-bound travellers who never pictured Morocco like this.