Missour

Missour belongs to Boulemane province in the Fez-Meknes region.¹ The provincial seat is Missour, although the province bears the name of the town of Boulemane.² At the 2024 census Missour had 28,408 inhabitants in 7,162 households, making it the largest of the province’s four urban municipalities, ahead of Outat El Haj with 20,673 and Boulemane with 6,761 inhabitants. The province as a whole had 205,411 inhabitants.³

Until the reorganisation of 2015, Boulemane province belonged to the Fès-Boulemane region, whose wilaya also included the prefecture of Fez and the provinces of Moulay Yacoub and Sefrou.⁴ Today it forms the Fez-Meknes region together with the prefectures of Fez and Meknes and six other provinces.⁵

Missour lies on the Moulouya. In 1959 the state water administration set up a gauging station here at 875 metres, above which the river drains a catchment of 10,323 square kilometres; downstream follow the gauging stations of Outat El Hadj and Tandite.⁶

In its description of the former Fès-Boulemane region, the Haut-Commissariat au Plan names the hills of Missour as a landscape of their own alongside the Middle Atlas and the Saïss plain. In the hills of Boulemane the climate is semi-arid, with no more than 250 millimetres of rain a year, esparto grass grows in the south, and the wide pastures of the high plateaus of Missour favour the keeping of sheep and goats.⁷

A study of sheep farming in Boulemane province distinguishes a mountain zone and a steppe zone. In the mountains the Timahdite breed predominates, on the steppes in the east of the province Beni Guil and Ouled Djellal; in the oases with olive trees, crosses of the D’man and Sardi breeds with Beni Guil are kept intensively.⁸

In July 2023 the Minister of Agriculture visited the Missour livestock market, which covered 19,500 square metres and was nearing completion, and the construction site of the abattoir on 5,000 square metres; the two projects together cost around 18.3 million dirhams. The province’s agricultural plan relies among other things on almond trees, and in the municipalities of Serghina, Enjil and Almis 112 producers grow saffron.⁹

In Enjil, a municipality of Boulemane province,¹⁰ the Eiffage group is building a solar power plant with a peak output of 42 megawatts for the Noor Atlas programme of the Masen agency. Work began in early 2026, and completion is planned for mid-2027.¹¹

The nearest station with official climate normals is Midelt, at 1,508 metres, a good 600 metres higher than Missour.¹² There, 186 millimetres of precipitation fall per year on average over 1991 to 2020, spread over all months; the mean daily maximum ranges from 12.6 °C in January to 34.1 °C in July.¹³