Is there free wifi in cafés and riads in Morocco?

Travellers are often pleasantly surprised by how connected Morocco is. Free wifi is genuinely widespread: almost every riad and hotel provides it as standard, cafés across the cities offer it to anyone who buys a drink, and many restaurants do too. For the everyday things — WhatsApping home, checking maps, posting photos, video calls from your riad room — it is perfectly serviceable in most places, and you will rarely struggle to get online when you are sitting somewhere.

That said, manage your expectations on quality, because it varies a lot. A modern Gueliz café or a smart hotel will have fast, stable fibre; a traditional riad deep in the Fes or Marrakech medina may have a connection that works beautifully in the courtyard but fades to nothing behind the thick old walls of your bedroom. Those gorgeous metre-thick rammed-earth and stone walls that keep medina houses cool are exactly what murders a wifi signal. If a strong connection matters, ask for a room near the router or work from the rooftop.

Coverage also thins out as you leave the cities. In the High Atlas mountains, in small desert-gateway towns and out at the dune camps near Merzouga, wifi ranges from slow to charmingly absent — and frankly, many guests come to treasure those off-grid nights under the stars. I would never count on camp wifi for anything that has to happen; treat the desert as a digital pause and let people at home know you may be quiet for a night or two.

So my honest recommendation mirrors what I tell everyone about staying connected: enjoy the free wifi, but do not depend on it for anything important. A local data SIM (Maroc Telecom, Orange or inwi) is cheap, gives you solid 4G across most of the country including a surprising amount of the desert road, and lets you hotspot your laptop or tablet anywhere. Use free wifi to save your data, and use your data to rescue you whenever the free wifi falls short — together they keep you reliably online the whole trip.