Hello beautiful people, and welcome back on the route with us! 🙂

Today we are going to talk about Morocco…and my first question to you today is: when you think about Morocco, what comes to mind first?

Probably the souks of Marrakesh… or the dunes of Merzouga in the Sahara… yummy tagine pots, carpet artisans, the Medina of Fez, the blue Chefchaouen…or a glass of mint tea so sweet it could wake up a sleeping camel!

That is the common view most foreigners have of Morocco… what most people don’t know though, is that between the cities and the desert there is a GIANT  that most travelers only see from the car window or the plane: the jaw-dropping Atlas Mountains!

The Atlas Mountains are a wall of rock, snow and green valleys about 2,500 km long (double the lenght of Italy, to give you an idea!), crossing three countries.

Here have been found dinosaur bones in the past and you can even find ski lifts today!

The place is gorgeous to visit, with uncrowded trails, stunning other-worldly views and authentic berber villages along the way!

In this article we’ve decided to collect 10 fun facts about the Atlas Mountains that (hopefully!) will surprise you and change your perspective about this lovely corner of the world: from Greek myths to monkeys, from love stories turned into lakes to villages that you can still only reach on foot.

Ready?

Grab your mint tea, and let’s dive right in! 😀

In this article:

• 1. The Atlas Mountains are a Titan turned into stone
• 2. The same name for mountains, an ocean and your book of maps
• 3. A 2,500 km wall across three countries
• 4. You can go skiing in Africa
• 5. Astronomers hunt for planets from the Atlas
• 6. Giant dinosaurs once walked here
• 7. The only macaques living outside Asia
• 8. Martin Scorsese turned the Atlas into Tibet
• 9. Two lakes born from a Berber love story
• 10. Villages you can only reach on foot (or by mule)

1. According to Mythology:

The Atlas Mountains Are

a Titan Turned into Stone!

If we need to start to understand the magnitude of the Atlas mountain, we cannot start anywhere else than from their name!

If “Atlas” reminds you of Greece, you are correct!

In Greek mythology indeed, Atlas was one of the “Titans”, the giants who ruled the world before the Olympian gods took over.

As the legend goes, when the Titans lost their war against Zeus, Atlas got the worst punishment of all: he had to hold up the sky on his shoulders, forever, at the western edge of the known world.

And where was the western edge of the world for the ancient Greeks?

You guessed it! Right here, in north-west Africa.

And if you’re a nerd for curiosities like us,

wait that the story gets even better…

According to the myth told by the Roman poet “Ovid” in his Metamorphoses, written about 2,000 years ago, the hero Perseus was flying home after killing Medusa, the monster whose gaze turned people into stone.

Tired, on his journey he stopped in the land of Atlas and asked for hospitality.

Atlas, alive at that time, refused.

A prophecy had warned him that a son of Zeus would one day steal the golden apples from his garden, and Perseus was exactly that: a son of Zeus.

So Atlas tried to chase him away, but it did not work…

Perseus pulled Medusa’s head out of his bag, and the giant turned into a mountain.

In Ovid’s version, Atlas’ beard and hair became the forests, his shoulders and hands became ridges, his head became the summit and his bones turned into rock, so huge that the whole sky could rest on top of him.

Amazing and poetic story if you ask me, to understand the magnitude of the Atlas Mountains 🙂

2. The Atlas Mountains are a

2,500 km Wall Across Three Countries

The Atlas isn’t one mountain range: it’s a family of ranges about 2,500 km long, running from the Atlantic coast of Morocco, through Algeria, all the way to Tunisia.

In Morocco you’ll find three of them:

• the Anti-Atlas in the south, the oldest and driest;

• the High Atlas in the middle, the tallest and most pictoresque, with Jebel Toubkal (4,167 m), the highest peak in North Africa which is the most sought after destination for multiple day Treks in the Atlas!

• the Middle Atlas in the north, green and covered in cedar forests 🙂

Geologically speaking, the High Atlas rose mainly when the African plate pushed against the European plate (the same slow collision that built the Alps !! ), while the rocks of the Anti-Atlas are hundreds of millions of years older.

The climate of the Atlas is pretty peculiar too! 

The northern and western slopes catch the humid air coming from the Atlantic, and here is more likely to encounter snow, rivers, orchards and forests.

On the contrary, the southern side stays dry and opens onto the Sahara and here the panorama is made of kasbahs, palm groves and stony plains like the Agafay Desert.

By self-driving, in a single day you can go from snow to palm trees!

Said that, in our opinion the best way to experience the Atlas is taking your time, ideally from 3 days to 7/10 days to truly understand local culture (there is a lot more than it meet the eye!) and the astonishing vastness of this land. 

PERSONAL TIP: To get the best out of your stay, we can also heartly recommend to check out the tours organised by Atlas Mountain Guide 🙂

10. Some Villages in the Atlas,

Can Only Be Reached on Foot (or by Mule)

Did you know?

In the High Atlas there are still many villages that have no road at all, or only a rough dirt track!

This is something we found very curious…

Between them run ancient mule paths, and everything travels on the back of an animal (or sometimes, overloaded-people too!): gas bottles, bags of flour, building materials and, yes, the backpacks of trekkers!

Mules are the real 4×4 of the Atlas xD

The people who live here are the Imazighen (often called “Berbers”), a name usually translated as “free people”.

Their language spoken here, the Tamazight, became an official language of Morocco in 2011, and in the mountains you can spot its ancient alphabet (called “Tifinagh”) on road signs, school walls, public buildings and such…

The villages you’ll likely to spot on a Atlas Trek, are made of stone and earth houses stacked on the slopes, surrounded by terraces of barley, walnut trees and apple orchards, watered by small channels that carry the snowmelt down from the peaks.

Life follows the seasons, and hospitality is a SERIOUS thing: walk into a village and it won’t take long before someone offers you mint tea!

In September 2023 a strong earthquake hit the High Atlas, and many of these villages were badly damaged. Rebuilding is still going on, and visiting the valleys with local guides and staying in local guesthouses is one of the most direct ways to support the families who live there.

If you want to see this side of the Atlas, the best way is to walk from village to village with someone who grew up there.

Rachid, for example, was born in the High Atlas and has been guiding visitors since 2008: with his local company you can go trekking in the High Atlas with a local guide, and in winter even ski touring.

Quick Tip: sleep at least one night in a village guesthouse (gîte). One evening of mint tea, tagine and stories with a local family will teach you more about the Atlas than a whole week of guidebooks.

4. You Can Go Skiing

in Africa (Yes, Really!)

Skiing in Africa sounds like a joke, right?

Well, about 80 km from Marrakesh, a drive of roughly an hour and a half, there’s Oukaïmeden, a ski resort with its base at around 2,600 m and a chairlift that climbs up to about 3,258 m on Jebel Attar.

That makes it one of the highest ski areas on the whole African continent!

Don’t expect the Alps, though…

Oukaïmeden has always had a charm of its own: locals renting out skis that look older than your parents, little villages of stone houses at the bottom of the slopes and, for years, donkeys helping to carry people and gear up the hill 😉

The ski season, when the snow is there, usually runs from January to March, hence it is very short!

 Still, worth the view from the top if you drop by in Morocco around these months (we’ve been there in January!): on clear days you look over a sea of snowy peaks, with the plains of Marrakesh far below and the desert beyond!

A small honest note: in recent years the lifts have been mostly closed, and a rebuilding project worth about 75 million dirhams has been announced to bring new lifts and slopes. Check the current status before you plan a ski trip!

In the meantime, the Atlas offers something even more adventurous: ski touring!

With skins on your skis and a local guide, you can climb snowy valleys and peaks where no lift has ever arrived 🙂

5. Astronomers Hunt for Planets

from the Top of the Atlas!

Dry air, close to no light pollution and high-altitude are all astonomers ask for and the Atlas Mountains have them all!

On the same plateau as the ski resort we’ve talked before, at more than 2,700 m, there is also the Oukaïmeden Observatory, run by Cadi Ayyad University of Marrakesh. 

In May 2016 the University of Liège (Belgium) installed up here TRAPPIST-North, a 60 cm robotic telescope.

It’s the twin of TRAPPIST-South, which observes the southern sky from the Atacama desert in Chile!

A few months later, in February 2017, came one of the biggest astronomy announcements of the decade: around a small red star called TRAPPIST-1, about 40 light-years from us, astronomers had found seven planets the size of the Earth. Three of them orbit in the so-called “habitable zone”, where liquid water could exist.

Of course, we might never get there, but observing the skyes is a habit that hunts humans from the beginning of time…

Here up on the Atlas, the views of the starry skyes are moving, you can actually see the stars “pulsing” and it is an emotion that easily can bring to your eyes (or at least, it did with mine XD): without city lights, the Milky Way here is so bright that you’ll understand immediately why scientists chose this place.

6. Giant Dinosaurs Once Walked

Where Hikers Walk Today

Long before Titans, kings and ski lifts, the Atlas belonged to someone much bigger.

In 1981, at a place called “Wawmda” in the province of Azilal, in the Central High Atlas, researchers found the bones of a huge sauropod: one of those long-necked, long-tailed plant-eating dinosaurs you’ve seen in every Jurassic movie! 

In 1999 it was officially named Atlasaurus imelakei: “Atlas” for the mountains where it was found, and “imelakei”, from an Arabic word meaning “giant”.

And giant it really was:

• about 15 m long;
• an estimated weight of around 22 tonnes;
• it lived in the Middle Jurassic, roughly 165 million years ago.

What makes it special is that the skeleton was almost complete, something really rare for dinosaurs of this size.

The Atlasaurus isn’t alone, either.

Paleontologists have found many sites with dinosaur footprints in the Central High Atlas, and some of them, like the tracks near the town of Demnate, can be visited 🙂

“So” – you might wonder – “dinosaurs were climbing mountains??” No, not really! xD

Back then, there were no mountains here: the area was a low landscape of plains and coasts, and the rock only rose millions of years later.

So, when you hike in these valleys, you might literally be walking on a dinosaur’s highway. Pretty cool, no? 😎

7. The Only Macaques

Living Outside Asia, are in the Atlas!

There are more than twenty species of macaques in the world, and all of them live in Asia.

All but one: the Barbary macaque, which lives in the forests of Morocco and Algeria.

And the place where you’re most likely to meet it is the Atlas!

The cedar forests of the Middle Atlas, around the towns of Ifrane and Azrou, are home to about three quarters of all the Barbary macaques in North Africa 🙂

Here we thought of leaving you few curiosities about these funny guys:

• they have almost no tail, which is why for centuries they were wrongly called “Barbary apes”;
• males take an active part in caring for the little ones, and they often carry babies around, something quite unusual among primates;
• a small population also lives on the Rock of Gibraltar, where they are the only wild monkeys in Europe!

The bad news is that the Barbary macaque is classified as Endangered.

Its home forests are shrinking, livestock competes for food and water, and baby monkeys are still illegally captured to be sold as pets even today.

The creation of the Ifrane National Park and anti-poaching campaigns have helped, but the species is still at risk.

If you meet them along the road (and in some spots it’s very likely), take all the photos you want, but don’t feed them as human food makes them sick, addicted and aggressive, and it changes their natural behaviour.

8. Martin Scorsese Turned

the Atlas Mountains into Tibet

This is a funny story!

In 1996 the movie director Martin Scorsese had a problem.

He was shooting Kundun, a film about the youth of the 14th Dalai Lama, and he needed Tibet.

But filming in Tibet, a movie about the Dalai Lama, was simply impossible for obvious reasons.

So he looked for a place with snowy peaks, stone villages, deep valleys and clear mountain light.

And he found it in Morocco.

Above the village of Imlil, at the foot of Toubkal, stands the Kasbah du Toubkal, an old fortified house turned into a mountain lodge.

For the movie it became the Dungkar Monastery, one of the key places in the Dalai Lama’s story, while other scenes were shot elsewhere in the Atlas and even in Casablanca.

According to the Kasbah, part of the money from the filming helped set up a local association that still supports the villages of the Imlil valley.

The result? Kundun came out in 1997 and received four Oscar nominations, and millions of viewers saw the High Atlas without knowing it, convinced they were looking at the Himalayas🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Today Imlil is the main starting point for treks to Toubkal, and walking up to the Kasbah you’ll understand very quickly why a Hollywood director fell in love with it 😉

9. Two Lakes in the Atlas were Born

from a (Tragic) Berber Love Story

High up in the Central High Atlas, at about 2,200 m, there’s a plateau where shepherds have moved their flocks for centuries called “Imilchil”.

Not far from the village there are two lakes with very romantic names: Isli and Tislit, which in Tamazight, the Berber language, mean “the groom” and “the bride”.

The legend goes like this.

A young man and a young woman from two rival tribes fell in love, but their families, divided by old disputes, forbade them to marry.

Heartbroken, the two lovers cried and cried, until their tears formed two lakes, one for him and one for her.

And there, they died.

Yes, it’s basically the Romeo and Juliet of the Atlas 💔

Their families, devastated by regret, decided that it should never happen again. So they created a day every year when young people from the different tribes could meet and choose their partners freely.

Times of course changed since then, but that tradition lives on in the Imilchil Marriage Festival, held every September near the shrine of the local saint Sidi Mohammed El Maghani.

It is a tiny festival which can still attract up to around 30,000 people: there’s music, dancing, a huge market for livestock and goods and, of course, plenty of engagements^^

A small myth-buster: contrary to what many people think, mass weddings don’t really take place at the festival. Couples get engaged and make it official, and the actual weddings come later.

Still, it’s one of the few places in the world where people travel to “fall in love”, and with these landscapes, we can’t really blame them! 🙂

10. Nothing is really too far away!

Here’s a last surprise: from the Atlas, the rest of Morocco is closer than you think!

Imlil, the trekking base at the foot of Toubkal, is only about 1.5 hours from Marrakesh.

From Marrakesh, the train gets you to Casablanca in roughly 2h40.

Need more speed? From Casablanca, Al Boraq, Africa’s first high-speed train, flies to Tangier in about 2h10!

Morocco is surprisingly well connected! 🙂

Fes, the oldest of the imperial cities, is around 7 hours away and going by road, you can cross the Middle Atlas, through the cedar forests of Ifrane and Azrou (and say hi to the macaques!🐒🤣).

From Fes, the blue alleys of Chefchaouen, the “Blue Pearl” of the Rif Mountains, are another 3.5–4 hours north.

And the Sahara?

The golden dunes of Erg Chebbi in Merzouga, some of them about 150 m high, are roughly 9–10 hours from Marrakesh, and from here you could easily visit them with a 4-days Merzouga tour.

The drive goes over the Tizi n’Tichka pass, through Ouarzazate and past the Dades and Todra gorges, so it’s an adventure in its own right. That’s why most people split it over 2–3 days 🙂

All in all, multi-day tours are such a popular option for a reason.

In 7–10 days you can link snowy peaks, imperial cities, blue villages and desert dunes, and let someone else handle the driving while you stare out of the window. 😉

Conclusions 🙂

And here we come at the end of this article! 🙂

From a Titan turned into stone to telescopes looking for new worlds, from dinosaurs and monkeys to love stories carved into lakes, the Atlas Mountains are much more than the backdrop of your photos from Marrakesh!

Before going, I would like to ask you:

• Did you know any of these fun facts?
• Which one surprised you the most?
• Would you rather ski at Oukaïmeden or trek from village to village?

Let us know in the comments below! 😀

If you’re planning a trip to Morocco, these articles might help you too: our 7 fun facts about Marrakesh and its surroundings, the 7 secrets of the Agafay Desert, our complete guide to the Agafay Desert and 10 curiosities about Fes. And if you love mountains and wild places, don’t miss our top 10 natural wonders to see in your lifetime.

Thank you for reading, and see you in the next article! 🙂