What is the Rif Mountains region like beyond Chefchaouen?

Almost everyone who says they have "done the Rif" has seen one square kilometre of it — the blue medina of Chefchaouen — and stopped there. Chaouen earns its fame, but the Rif is a long, crumpled range stretching across the whole top of Morocco, and it is the greenest, wettest, most un-Saharan part of the country. Mist clings to the slopes, the hillsides are terraced with olives, figs and cannabis, and the culture is distinctly Riffian — a proud, independent-minded Berber people with their own history and their own dialect.

The best of the wider Rif for a visitor is the walking. Talassemtane National Park, right above Chefchaouen, protects rare Moroccan fir forests and limestone gorges, and the day hike to the Akchour waterfalls and the natural rock bridge of "God's Bridge" is one of the loveliest in the country — a river walk through a cool green canyon that surprisingly few foreign visitors do. There are multi-day treks across the park to the villages of the high Rif for the genuinely adventurous, ideally with a local guide because waymarking is thin.

Further east the Rif gets wilder and far less visited — Bab Berred, Issaguen and the high massif around Jebel Tidighine, the range's highest peak. I have to be candid here: this is Morocco's cannabis-growing heartland, the Ketama area in particular, and around those rural roads foreign visitors are sometimes approached or pressured to buy. It is illegal, occasionally a scam or shakedown setup, and I steer clients firmly away from the kif circuit. The eastern Rif rewards only confident, experienced travellers who know exactly where they are going.

So the honest verdict: beyond Chefchaouen the Rif is wonderful for people who love mountains, cool air and green walking, and a Chaouen base plus the Akchour hike is something I recommend warmly. But public transport is patchier than the imperial circuit, you really want a driver or a confident self-drive, and the deep eastern Rif is not casual-tourist territory. Come for the hiking and the calm, with realistic expectations about logistics.