Is the Draa Valley to Zagora route worth driving?

The Draa Valley is one of those drives that sneaks up on you. Coming over the Tizi n'Tinifift pass from Ouarzazate, you descend into Agdz and suddenly the road is running alongside an unbroken corridor of date palms with the Draa river threading through — the longest palm grove in Morocco, fed from the Atlas snowmelt. For nearly a hundred kilometres you pass mud-brick ksour and kasbahs half-hidden in the greenery, with the bare desert mountains pressing in on both sides.

I genuinely prefer this route for travellers who find the Merzouga road too well-trodden. Stop at Agdz to climb the restored Kasbah of Tamnougalt, an old Jewish-Berber fortified village, and at the riverside kasbahs you can usually wander freely with far fewer tour buses than the eastern route. The palmery is at its most beautiful in late afternoon when the light goes gold through the fronds.

Zagora itself is a frontier town rather than a beauty — its claim to fame is the legendary (much-photographed, somewhat touristy) signpost reading "Timbuktu 52 days" by camel, a reminder that this was a real terminus of the trans-Saharan caravan trade. From Zagora you can reach the smaller, intimate dunes of Tinfou or push on to the remote Erg Chigaga, a wilder and far less crowded sand sea than Erg Chebbi.

So: worth driving, yes — with the caveat that the dunes near Zagora are more modest than Merzouga's, so I steer dune-purists toward Erg Chigaga (a rough 4x4 run beyond M'hamid) for the real thing. For the valley itself, the oasis, the kasbahs and the sense of caravan history, the Draa is one of the most atmospheric and underrated drives in the south.