What is Morocco like in the low or off season?

Morocco's low season actually comes in two very different flavours, and it's worth separating them. The first is high summer — July and August — when the interior is so blisteringly hot that sensible sightseers stay away, so inland prices fall to some of their lowest of the year. The second, and the one I more often mean by 'off season,' is the cooler winter stretch: chiefly November and then January and February, setting aside the brief, expensive Christmas–New-Year spike that interrupts it. These winter weeks are the classic quiet, cheap, low-season window, and they're the ones most travellers ask me about.

Winter low season has a real charm if you know what you're getting. The days in Marrakech, the south and the coast are mild and frequently sunny — high teens°C, lovely and bright, a genuine tonic if you're escaping a grey northern winter — while the nights turn cold, dropping to single figures in the cities and below freezing in the desert and the snow-covered High Atlas. So you can have warm, café-terrace afternoons and crisp, fire-side evenings in the same day, with snowy mountain views as a bonus. You just have to pack properly for the cold nights, which is the single thing people get wrong. There can be the occasional grey or rainy spell, particularly in the north, but plenty of bright days too.

The great rewards of low season are value and tranquillity. Prices are at their floor — riads, desert camps and tours at their cheapest, with room to splurge on a better place than you'd manage in spring — and the famous sights are at their quietest, so you can stand at a desert sunset or wander the Fes medina without the peak-season crush. Availability is wide open, so you can be spontaneous. Almost everything stays open and runs normally; the desert camps operate year-round (with extra blankets in winter). The only real seasonal caveat beyond the cold is that high-summer inland travel is genuinely heat-limited, which is why I steer summer low-season trips toward the breezy Atlantic coast instead.

My verdict: the low season is excellent value and wonderfully peaceful if you match your plans to the conditions. For winter, embrace the mild days and pack hard for the cold nights — it's a fantastic, affordable, crowd-free time to do the cities and the desert, with the romance of Atlas snow thrown in. For high summer, go coastal and dodge the inland furnace. Either way, you'll pay the least and share Morocco with the fewest other people — a trade-off plenty of my savviest travellers happily make.