Tafraoute, the red city

Tafraoute’s main tourist attraction’s located in its mountains that seem to defy the law of gravitaty to disimulate stand by their bright colors and thus encircle the city. For its inhabitants, they don’t have the kidness of the other ones of Morocco so it’s considered different but the rest remains with excellence because of these same people proud to be able to keep intact around.

The houses have red windows with white frame with an architectural resemblance to Sana in Yemen. A simple architecture could be due to its inhabitants conservatives, agriculture unprofitable or a weakened economy where revenues are contributed by citizens working abroad, more specifically in Europe. The focus of Tafraout is Mohamed-al-Khamis square sorrounded by whitness of the post office, a cybercafe, a shopping trip with the fruit and vegetable market, a bazaar and slippershopsand, carpetshops artisanat.

The village also includes hotels and restaurants, attractions that allowing to find almonds, palms, argans and citrus trees. It gets wonderful to see the large number of concentrated citrus with lemons scent of evolve and other ones. Local customs in Tafraoute focus on the production of olive and argan oil. The argan tree is climbed by goats, which go up to it to eat its leaves but only grows in the south of Morocco. Women wear black dresses and black head scarves to preserve Islamic culture and demostrating compliance with such respect to the entire region.

Transport ranges from donkeys as transport for people and goods, but women use them to transport goods and they walk to their side. The burden of this packaging is somewhat heavy but larger compared with the size of the donkey. From Agadir you can take a bus for a day trip to Tafroute taking the easter route that goes through Ait Baha, a journey of 143km. On the return’s passed back to Tiznit and going back to Agadir. Taking the wide route to pass through the picturesque Anti Atlas, but Tafraoute can be reached by bus or great taxi.

The Tafraoute shopping center consists of several large carpet stores like Maison Berbera and Maison Touareg, sales center of Beber carpet. Berber jewelery’s handmade in the main square, at the entrance of the carpet store’s selling traditional Moroccan leather. Talking about Tafraoute’s landscape we can say that it’s possible to take a pleasent walking sourrounded by pink granite rocks sometimes falling like a waterfall from geysers, some of them form the structure of a lion,.

From Tafraoute we find the village of Aguerd-oudad with a formation that’s known as the Napoleon hat, this is the village painted in blue stones. Thanks to the rock formations and palm trees forms let a perfect setting for picnic or walk in the shadow of the trees and enjoy the varied landscape to large and small scale, and the more adventurous can also climb pink rocks and get to the top of the boulders.