Marrakech Desert Tours

Six of these tours are round trips: the two-day Zagora trip, the three-, four-, five- and six-day Merzouga loops, and the eight-day circuit. They end at your Marrakech accommodation or the airport, which is the right choice if you are flying out of Marrakech or have a hotel to come back to. Four are crossings: the three-, four-, five- and seven-day tours to Fes end at your accommodation or the airport in Fes. Merzouga lies between the two cities, so a crossing sees the same dunes and the same kind of camp as a loop but saves the long drive back and puts the second imperial city at the end of the trip.

Crossings in the other direction, and the tours from Fes, Casablanca, Tangier and Agadir, are compared on our Morocco desert tours page. Birding and fossil trips also leave from Marrakech: the four-day Atlas Mountains birding tour, the seven-day Atlas and desert birding tour, and the three-day, five-day and ten-day fossil and geology tours to Erfoud and the Anti-Atlas.

Merzouga is 535 to 555 km away on the Erg Chebbi dunes, which rise to about 150 m; it needs three days from Marrakech and is where nine of the ten tours on this page spend their desert night. Zagora is about 350 km away; its dunes are modest, and it is the only desert you can reach and return from in two days. The three-day crossing to Fes is listed with a Sahara camp because its itinerary describes both a Merzouga and a Zagora version, so confirm which when you enquire. The full comparison, including Erg Chigaga and the Agafay plateau that are not on this page, is in Merzouga or Zagora; the village and the dunes are described in our Merzouga and Erg Chebbi guide.

Merzouga is nine to ten hours of driving from Marrakech, over the Tizi n'Tichka pass at 2,260 m, past Ait Benhaddou and the film studios at Ouarzazate, then east along the Dades valley. That is why every Merzouga tour here splits the outbound drive over two days with a night in the Dades Gorges, reaches the Todgha Gorge and the dunes on the second day, and spends the morning of that day in the car: the camel ride comes in the late afternoon. The loops drive back to Marrakech in one long day; the crossings continue north through the Ziz valley and the Middle Atlas to Fes. The road is described stop by stop in our Marrakech to Merzouga distance guide.

At the dunes you leave the car and ride to a Berber tent camp among the dunes, about an hour and a half where the itineraries give a length, timed for sunset; then dinner, drums and the stars, and breakfast after the sunrise. What the night is like, what to pack and what the camp pages do and do not say about the tents is in what to expect on a Sahara desert tour; longer rides and treks with the camel men are on our camel trekking page.