Eighty kilometres separate Agadir from Taroudant, and in an hour and ten minutes you move from a 1960s seaside town to a city ringed by seven and a half kilometres of rammed earth walls. It is the easiest trip out of the Souss, the one that needs the least planning, and the one people most often come back from wishing they had stayed longer.
Beyond Taroudant the Anti-Atlas begins: Tafraoute, the painted rocks, the Aït Mansour gorges. That is a different register. No longer a half day out, but a journey that needs a night away and a suitable car.
Agadir to Taroudant: the easy part
You leave Agadir eastwards through Aït Melloul, then join the expressway along the Souss plain. The road is wide and quick, lined with citrus groves and greenhouses. It is the same axis as the airport, so you can pick the car up on arrival and head straight for Taroudant: the counter details are in renting a car at Agadir Al Massira airport.
Two landmarks along the way: Oulad Teima at kilometre 45, a large farming town where the speed limit drops and checks are frequent, and the entrance to Taroudant at kilometre 80, announced from far off by the ochre line of the walls.
Parking and visiting Taroudant
You can drive through the medina of Taroudant, unlike those of Essaouira or Marrakech, but it is rarely a good idea: the streets are narrow, crowded with carts and scooters, and you circle for a long time looking for a space.
The simplest approach is to park on place Assarag or just outside one of the gates, and do the rest on foot. Distances inside the walls are short: ten minutes on foot from the Arab souk to the Berber souk.
What is worth seeing fits into half a day:
- The circuit of the ramparts by car, seven and a half kilometres of ochre earth pierced by five gates. It is one of the few places in Morocco where the wall is complete. Best at the end of the day, when the light is low.
- The Arab souk, in the heart of the medina: spices, leather, basketwork. Less touristy and far less insistent than the one in Marrakech.
- The Berber souk, for Anti-Atlas silver and carpets.
- The tanneries, outside the wall on the eastern side. The smell gives you warning.
One useful note: Taroudant is markedly hotter than Agadir. The Souss plain is closed off by mountains and gets no sea breeze. In July and August the gap can reach ten to fifteen degrees between the two towns in mid afternoon.
Climbing into the Anti-Atlas
Two roads lead up to Tafraoute from Agadir. They do not have the same character.
The route via Aït Baha heads south east from the Agadir area, crosses the first foothills and reaches Tafraoute after about 170 kilometres. It is the more direct and the faster of the two, with a fine climb through almond groves towards the end.
The route via Taroudant and Igherm is longer and higher. It crosses villages where you no longer meet rental cars, and it gives views over the whole Anti-Atlas. Allow a full day from Agadir.
Two sites around Tafraoute justify the trip. The painted rocks, a few kilometres from the village, are granite blocks turned blue by the Belgian artist Jean Vérame in the early 1980s; the paint is flaking, which suits them. The Aït Mansour gorges, to the south, are a palm grove wedged between pink walls, followed for several kilometres by a small road and then by a track.
The car: where it really matters
As far as Taroudant, any small car does the job without a second thought. As far as Tafraoute via Aït Baha it is surfaced too, even if the road is narrow and full of bends.
It is in the Aït Mansour gorges that the question arises. The tarmac stops and becomes a stony track, with fords and ruts. A small rental car gets through when the track is dry and you drive at walking pace; it scrapes as soon as there has been water. If the Anti-Atlas is your main objective, take a vehicle with decent ground clearance. The full comparison is in small car, saloon or 4x4 in the Souss.
Second point, true for the whole Anti-Atlas: fuel. Between Aït Baha and Tafraoute the filling stations are few and some close early. The local habit is to leave with a full tank from Taroudant or Aït Baha, never to wait for Tafraoute.
Combining it with something else
Taroudant sits well on the way to Marrakech: leave Agadir in the morning, have lunch under the arcades of place Assarag, and join the motorway in the afternoon. That run is described in Agadir to Marrakech.
What you should not count on is doing Taroudant and Tafraoute in the same day from Agadir. On paper it is three hundred and fifty kilometres; on these roads it is eight hours of driving and nothing else.
For the Anti-Atlas, ground clearance matters more than anything else. Look at the height under the body before the power and the gearbox: that is what decides whether you reach the end of the Aït Mansour gorges. The available models are on the car rental in Agadir page, and the rental terms in the complete guide to renting in Agadir.
Photo: Bjørn Christian Tørrissen via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
