What is the prickly pear cactus and its fruit (hindi) in Morocco?

The prickly pear cactus (Opuntia) is one of those plants that's everywhere in the Moroccan countryside once you start noticing it — great sprawling walls of flat, spiny green paddles lining fields and roadsides, used as natural fences and to stop soil erosion. It isn't native; it arrived from the Americas centuries ago, but it has thoroughly made itself at home in Morocco's dry rural landscape.

Its fruit is the summer treat. Moroccans call it 'hindi,' or sometimes 'karmous nsara' (the Christians' fig), and from June onward you'll see vendors with carts piled high with the egg-shaped fruits. The magic is in the peeling: a skilled seller slices and flips the spiny skin off in seconds with a knife, handing you the cool, jewel-coloured flesh — sweet, mildly melon-like, studded with crunchy seeds. At a couple of dirhams each, it's the cheapest, most refreshing street snack in the summer heat.

A word of warning I always give guests: never pick or peel one yourself. The fruit is covered in tiny, near-invisible hair-like spines called glochids that lodge painfully in your skin and are miserable to remove. Leave it to the expert vendors, who handle them with practised ease. Watching them work is half the fun — it's a little piece of everyday Moroccan summer theatre.

There's a luxury side too. The cactus produces tiny seeds, and the oil cold-pressed from them — prickly pear seed oil — is one of the most expensive cosmetic oils in the world, because it takes an enormous quantity of seeds to make a small bottle. So this humble roadside cactus gives Morocco both a beloved few-dirham street fruit and a high-end beauty product. I love that contrast; it's very Moroccan.