Tafraout

Tafraout sits in a granite bowl in the Anti-Atlas, its houses the same rose-pink as the huge, weathered boulders scattered across the surrounding hills — a landscape that turns genuinely luminous in early morning and late afternoon light. It sees far fewer visitors than the Atlas towns further north, and that quiet is a large part of its appeal: traditional Amazigh village life continues around it largely as it always has, in almond and argan terraces threaded between the rock.

A short drive out of town, a stretch of boulders was painted blue, pink and purple in 1984 by the Belgian artist Jean Vérame, using thousands of litres of paint donated for the project — a strange, striking piece of land art now known simply as the Painted Rocks, faded by decades of sun but still a genuine curiosity. Come in February, if you can, for the region's almond blossom — pale pink and white across the valleys — which draws a modest local festival and turns the whole approach to town into something worth slowing down for.