What is the Middle Atlas region like (and is it worth visiting)?

People are genuinely startled the first time I drive them up into the Middle Atlas, because it looks nothing like the Morocco of the brochures. Within an hour of leaving Fes you climb into rolling green uplands, then into proper cedar forest — tall, ancient, cool and damp, with woodsmoke in the air and snow on the hills in winter. It is the gentlest of Morocco's three Atlas ranges, more pasture and woodland than jagged peak, and it acts as the natural staircase between the imperial north and the pre-Saharan south.

Ifrane is the showpiece and the strangest stop — a 1930s town the French built to look like an Alpine resort, all steep red roofs, neat gardens and a famous stone lion carved by a WWII prisoner. It is spotlessly clean and faintly surreal, home to a prestigious English-language university, and Moroccans come here to ski at Michlifen in winter. I find it charming for an hour or two rather than a destination in itself; the real magic is the forest around it. Azrou, just down the road, is more workaday and Berber, with a good Tuesday-style craft market and the gateway to the cedar groves proper.

The thing nearly everyone wants is the Cèdre Gouraud forest near Azrou, where troops of wild Barbary macaques — Morocco's only monkeys — live among the giant cedars and will come right up to the car. I love it, but I always coach clients not to feed them (it makes them aggressive and sick); just watch. From there you can push on to the Ifrane National Park lakes, the Aguelmame Azigza and Dayet Aoua, and the cascades at Ouzoud lie further south on a separate route. It is birdwatching, gentle walking, picnic country — restorative rather than dramatic.

My honest framing: the Middle Atlas is rarely a headline of anyone's first trip, and I would not send you here at the expense of Marrakech or the Sahara. But it is the perfect breather. On the long Fes-to-desert drive it turns a dull transfer into a beautiful one — lunch among the cedars, cool air, the macaques — and for anyone who wants green, quiet, walkable Morocco away from the souks, a night in Ifrane or Azrou is time very well spent. Suits families, nature lovers and anyone melting in the summer heat below.