What are the most unique experiences in Morocco?

The most singular experience is the desert camp, but I mean doing it properly — not just a photo stop. Riding a camel into the Erg Chebbi dunes at dusk, eating a tagine cooked over coals, sitting around drums with Berber guides, then sleeping in a tent with the flap open to the stars. Waking before dawn to climb a dune in silence is something you simply cannot do anywhere else, and it is uniquely, unmistakably Morocco.

In the cities, the most authentic experience is the hammam. Not a polished spa version — a real neighbourhood hammam where you are scrubbed pink with black soap and a kessa glove, steamed, rinsed with buckets, and emerge feeling reborn. It is communal, slightly bewildering the first time, and it is how Moroccans have bathed for generations. I pair it with the Fes tanneries, where you stand on a terrace above the centuries-old stone dye pits and watch men work hides by hand exactly as they did in the medieval era.

Food and craft give you the next layer. Visiting a women’s argan cooperative in the Souss valley, where the kernels are cracked and pressed by hand into oil, is both delicious and quietly powerful. A market-to-table cooking class in a Marrakech riad, or a long Berber family lunch in an Atlas village above Imlil — bread baked in a clay oven, mint tea poured from height, vegetables from the terrace — connects you to the country in a way no monument can.

And nothing else on earth is quite like Jemaa el-Fna after dark. By day it is a busy square; by night it transforms into a swirling open-air theatre of grilled-meat stalls, snail-soup vendors, Gnaoua musicians, henna artists and storytellers performing to circles of locals. UNESCO actually protects it as living oral heritage. Stand on a rooftop terrace above it with a mint tea and you are watching something that has happened here for a thousand years.