What are the top 10 experiences in Morocco?

When people ask me to rank Morocco, I always start with the Sahara, because nothing else on the trip comes close to that feeling. We drive past Merzouga, swap the 4x4 for a camel, and ride out over the Erg Chebbi dunes as the light goes copper. After dinner in a desert camp, the guides play drums, the fire dies down, and you lie back to a sky so thick with stars it looks fake. That is the experience nobody forgets, and it always tops my list.

From there my next tier is about cities and contrast. Sunset over Jemaa el-Fna in Marrakech — the snake charmers packing up, the food stalls firing up, the call to prayer rolling across the rooftops from a café terrace — is pure sensory overload in the best way. Then there is Chefchaouen, where you spend a whole morning just walking blue-washed lanes, and the Fes medina, where I genuinely recommend getting lost: the tanneries, the coppersmiths, the 1,200-year-old streets that no map really captures.

My middle of the list is the landscape and the cinema of it all. A High Atlas trek — even a day hike up to a Berber village above Imlil — gives you walnut groves, mud-brick hamlets and snow on the peaks. Ait Benhaddou, the fortified kasbah you have seen in Gladiator and Game of Thrones, is staggering in person at golden hour. Todra Gorge, with its 300-metre red walls closing in over a shallow stream, is the kind of place you stand in silently.

I close with the slower, sensory experiences that round a trip out. Essaouira’s windswept Atlantic harbour, with blue fishing boats and grilled sardines, is the antidote to the heat inland. A proper hammam — scrubbed pink, steamed, then mint tea afterwards — is the most Moroccan reset there is. And honestly, the tenth slot is just mint tea on a rooftop at dusk, anywhere. Do those ten and you will have seen the real Morocco, not a postcard version of it.