The Road of a Thousand Bends

The road through the Dadès Gorge has so many hairpin turns that the locals stopped counting and the tourists never started.

The gorge cuts north into the High Atlas from the Dadès Valley, a canyon of red and orange rock that deepens as you drive. The first few kilometres are wide — almond orchards, scattered kasbahs, a river running green in spring. Then the walls close in. The rock formations at the mouth of the gorge look like stacked fingers — erosion columns that locals call the monkey fingers, or sometimes the human bodies, depending on the light and their mood.

The road was paved in the 1980s. Before that, reaching the upper gorge required a mule or exceptional confidence in a Land Rover. The pavement follows the river, switching back and forth across the canyon floor, climbing through a series of hairpins that are genuinely alarming if you are not the driver and only slightly less alarming if you are. The famous photograph — the one that appears in every Morocco road trip article — is taken from a viewpoint where the road loops back on itself four times in the space of a hundred metres.

Above the paved section, the road turns to piste and continues into the mountains toward the Tizi n'Ouano pass at 2,700 metres. Nomadic families camp in the upper gorge in summer. In winter, snow closes the pass.

Most visitors drive the gorge as part of the route from Marrakech to Merzouga — the Ouarzazate road, the route of a thousand kasbahs. They stop for photographs at the hairpins, lunch at one of the restaurants perched above the river, and continue east. The ones who stay overnight in the guesthouses built into the canyon walls hear the river at night and see stars that the valley floor, with its scattered electric lights, no longer shows.