Khenifra

The municipality of Khenifra belongs to the province of the same name in the Beni Mellal-Khenifra region, whose capital is Beni Mellal.¹ The town lies on the Oum Er-Rbia in the western foothills of the southern Middle Atlas.² The Haut-Commissariat au Plan gives its elevation as 842 metres³, the Encyclopaedia Britannica as about 1,000 metres.⁴

In the 2024 census the municipality had 123,738 inhabitants and the province 370,240.⁵ In the province, 54.3 percent of residents gave Amazigh as their mother tongue and 45.6 percent Arabic; in rural areas the share of Amazigh was 80.3 percent, in towns 40.8 percent.⁶

The place was originally the winter camp of the Ait Affi, a branch of the Zaiane, a group of Amazigh nomads of the area. It gained importance in 1688, when the Alaouite sultan Moulay Ismail had a kasbah and a bridge built here.⁷ Towards the end of the 19th century Moha ou Hammou Zayani, whom the sultan had appointed governor of the tribes of the area, set up a market on this spot and later had the town of Khenifra laid out.⁸

The people of the surrounding countryside mostly speak Tamazight; many belong to the semi-nomadic Zaiane, keep sheep and grow cereals.⁹ Khenifra province accounts for 26.4 percent of the sheep in the Beni Mellal-Khenifra region.¹⁰ It has 250,197 hectares of natural forest, just over 29 percent of the region's forest area, and in 2019/20 supplied the region's entire output of timber, 8,757 cubic metres.¹¹

Khenifra National Park was established in 2008, covers more than 80,000 hectares and lies entirely within the Cèdre de l'Atlas biosphere reserve.¹² The projects of the Agence Nationale des Eaux et Forêts in the park include developing Lake Aguelmam Azegza for nature tourism.¹³ In the Khenifra area, a programme for 2023 to 2027 provides for the regeneration and reforestation of 1,300 hectares, mainly with cedars and holm oaks.¹⁴

The Cèdre de l'Atlas biosphere reserve was recognised in 2016 and covers 1,375,000 hectares in the central Atlas. It holds 75 percent of all the world's Atlas cedars; round-leaved oak and maritime pine also grow there, and its animals include the Barbary macaque, the serval and Cuvier's gazelle.¹⁵

The Ramsar site Aguelmams Sidi Ali–Tifounassine lies in the provinces of Ifrane and Khenifra; it covers 1,060 hectares and has been listed since 15 January 2005. It comprises three high-altitude wetlands between 1,900 and 2,100 metres, fed by snowmelt and springs, and is a wintering area for migratory birds such as the ruddy shelduck and the red-knobbed coot.¹⁶

In Ajdir, in Khenifra province, King Mohammed VI gave the speech on 17 October 2001 with which he sealed the dahir establishing the Institut Royal de la Culture Amazighe.¹⁷ For the 25th anniversary of the speech and of the institute's founding, IRCAM held a series of cultural, scientific and artistic events at its headquarters in 2026.¹⁸