Morocco itineraries

How long do you need, and what can you realistically see? Morocco is a big country with long overland distances, so the best itineraries pick a few anchors and link them without backtracking. The routes below are built around real travel times — a seven-hour train here, a full day's drive to the desert there — rather than an optimistic map. Whether you have one week or three, start by deciding how many days you need, then choose the route that matches your time and interests.

Matching the route to your trip length

With one week, resist the urge to circle the whole country. The one-week itinerary anchors on Marrakech and Fes and adds a single big excursion — the desert or the Atlas — which is genuinely all seven days allows without spending them in transit. With ten days to two weeks, you can build a real loop: the two-week itinerary takes in the imperial cities, the Sahara, and the Atlas at a pace that leaves room to actually stop and look. If you want to skip the well-trodden Marrakech route entirely, the northern circuit links Tangier, Chefchaouen, and Fes — Morocco's most underrated week — while the Sahara + Atlas loop is the great southern road trip out of Marrakech.

The most common pacing mistake is booking a new city every night. Moroccan overland journeys are long, and a night-here, night-there schedule means you spend your holiday packing, checking out, and sitting on trains rather than in the medinas you came for. It's almost always better to base yourself in one or two cities for several nights each and take day trips and overnight excursions out from them. A second habit worth adopting: fly into one city and out of another (an "open-jaw" ticket, usually priced similarly to a return) so your route forms a loop and you never retrace a long journey just to reach your departure airport.

Every itinerary below includes a full day-by-day breakdown with transport built in, and links through to the detailed city and region guides. To size a route to your own wish-list, use the trip planner; to estimate what it will cost, run your day count through the budget calculator.