Ouarzazate

Ouarzazate belongs to the province of the same name in the Draa-Tafilalet region¹ and is its capital.² In 2024 the municipality had 79,218 inhabitants and the province as a whole 304,932.³ The city lies on the southern foreland of the High Atlas, where the Dadès and the Imini join to form the Drâa.⁴

People were already present here in the Palaeolithic: near the airport lies an Acheulean site where stone cleavers have also been found.⁵ The name first appears in writing in the 11th century, in the work of the Andalusian geographer al-Bakri, who describes the route from Sijilmassa to Aghmat.⁶

When Charles de Foucauld travelled through the oasis in 1884, it consisted of the kasbahs of Tifoultoute, Taourirt and Tamasla and about a dozen ksour; there was not yet a town. In 1928 a military post was established, around which the present town grew up with a souk and administration; an airfield was laid out in the same year.⁷

In the town stands the Kasbah Taourirt, one of the great earthen complexes on the former caravan route between the Sahara and Marrakesh. According to oral tradition it was built in the 17th century; from the 1880s the Glaoua family greatly enlarged it.⁸ The caid's residence owes its splendour above all to Caid Hammadi (1882–1939): rooms with carved stucco, plaster panels, mud-brick arches, painted tataoui ceilings and murals. Part of the complex was restored in the 1990s; the residence was later documented by Carleton University and the Getty Conservation Institute together with the Moroccan heritage centre CERKAS.⁹

In the Ounila valley, in the same province, lies the ksar of Aït-Ben-Haddou, a World Heritage site since 1987 under criteria iv and v. Behind walls with corner towers, earthen houses crowd together, along with a mosque, a square, threshing floors, a caravanserai and two cemeteries, one Muslim and one Jewish. The oldest buildings probably date from the 17th century; the place was a stop on the trade route that led through the Drâa valley and over the Tizi-n’Telouet pass to Marrakesh.¹⁰ Since 2000 it has been part of the Oasis du sud marocain biosphere reserve, which covers some 7.2 million hectares.¹¹

Since the 1960s the area has been a filming location: in 1962 scenes for Lawrence of Arabia were shot in Aït-Ben-Haddou.¹² Five kilometres west of the town lie the Atlas Studios, founded in 1983 by the entrepreneur Mohamed Belghmi. Productions filmed there include Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven and Game of Thrones; many of the sets are still standing and are shown on guided tours.¹³

Near Ouarzazate, Masen operates four solar power plants. Noor I was connected to the grid in February 2016 with 160 megawatts; it uses parabolic troughs and can store heat for up to three hours.¹⁴ Noor II (200 megawatts, parabolic troughs) and Noor III (150 megawatts, solar tower) followed in 2018, both with more than seven hours of thermal storage.¹⁵ They are joined by the Noor IV photovoltaic plant with 72 megawatts.¹⁶ According to the operator, the four plants together occupy around 1,800 hectares.¹⁷

Just below the confluence lies the reservoir of the El Mansour Eddahbi dam.¹⁸ The dam was built in 1972; it supplies drinking water for Ouarzazate and irrigation water for around 26,000 hectares in Zagora province.¹⁹ Since 2005 the reservoir and six palm oases along the Drâa have formed the Moyenne Dr’a Ramsar site, covering 45,000 hectares.²⁰

The town has its own airport (IATA code OZZ).²¹ The weather station lies at 1,136 metres. Averaged over the years 1991 to 2020, 115 millimetres of precipitation fell there each year; the mean daily maximum ranged from 17.3 °C in January to 38.8 °C in July.²²