Is Erfoud worth visiting?

Erfoud is one of those places where I gently reset expectations. It's a modern-ish administrative and market town on the road to the Merzouga dunes, and the vast majority of travellers use it as a logistics base — refuelling, picking up supplies, sometimes overnighting — rather than as a destination they came to see. It doesn't have an old medina or grand monuments, so on the face of it there's not much to detain you.

But it does have one genuinely interesting specialty: fossils. The desert around Erfoud was a seabed hundreds of millions of years ago, and the rock is packed with marine fossils — ammonites, orthoceras, trilobites. The town has a real local industry of quarrying that fossil-rich black limestone and cutting it into polished slabs, tabletops, sinks and ornaments. Visiting one of the fossil workshops on the edge of town, watching them saw and polish a 350-million-year-old creature into a gleaming marble surface, is a surprisingly memorable hour, and it's the kind of thing kids love.

Erfoud is also famous for its Date Festival in October, when the harvest comes in and the town celebrates with music and markets — if your timing lines up, that's a lively local event. The town sits at the head of the beautiful Ziz Valley too, so the approach from the north, through the palm gorges, is lovely.

My honest verdict: don't make a special journey for Erfoud, but since you'll likely pass through it on the way to Merzouga anyway, build in a short fossil-workshop stop — it's the one thing the town does that nowhere else does as well. Beyond that, push on the extra 30–40 minutes to the dunes themselves, where the real magic of this corner of the Sahara lies.