Taourirt Kasbah

Our visit to Taourirt Kasbah was as part of a coach day trip from Marrakech, details of that are in my other blog here. I must confess to knowing nothing about this place before we got here and the building is relatively new, being built in the nineteenth century to control caravan routes from west Africa. The building is a real maze inside although it’s probably better thought of as a fire support bases rather than a castle in the normal sense.

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Visiting Taourirt Kasbah

The road across the Atlas was quite good and it was lovely looking at the snowy mountains as we traversed them. We had a welcome tea stop to enjoy the scenery before continuing on to the town. The kasbah is geared for tourism and it looks like every trip includes a stop there so there is plenty of parking. It’s also on a wide road so pretty easy to find. I wouldn’t have any qualms about driving here next time I visited so it was nice to see what the conditions were like before taking that jump.

My Experience at Taourirt Kasbah

We had an early start as we were being collected at 7.10 for our trip to the Atlas mountains and kasbahs. The weather was beautifully clear but damned cold! We were expecting a small tour but there were actually 16 of us on the minibus – next time it’ll be a private tour!

I had taken travel sickness tablets so was able to doze a lot of the way but we stopped a couple of times at roadside restaurants for coffee and the view. The roads were decent, where they existed, but in a lot of places were being dug up or improved but we made good progress and arrived at the first proper stop, Taouririt Kasbah, late morning.

This was a very impressive fortified residence, made from mud brick, but we didn’t get to see much of the exterior. We were taken inside (where it was damned cold) and given lectures on various bits until I wandered off to explore. Some of the rooms were impressive but not compared with Andalusian architecture, really a very poor imitation.

The jumble of rooms and floors meant it was difficult to get any sense of scale or orientation and we kept looking out of the windows to get an idea of where we were. It would be interesting to visit on an unescorted tour so you could see the original parts of the building as well as the restored parts and also spend more time exploring.

Photo Gallery

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History of Taourirt Kasbah

Set among a background of stunning mountain scenery and the Sahara Desert, the Kasbah Taourirt is one of the most beautiful Kasbahs in Morocco. In past, it was a strategic location controlled by the Glaoui for the Saharan Caravan Route to West Africa.

While Taourirt acted as the main Glaoui residence, it did not house the main Glaoui chiefs. Instead, it housed the second tier of command, such as the dynasty’s sons, servants, cousins, builders and craftsmen.At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Glaoui, or the pasha of Marrakesh, were the lords of the south and had access to the High Atlas. They were given complete power by the French during colonial rule to keep the Southern tribes peaceful and non-threatening.

The Kasbahs inside Taourirt are best described as a cobweb village of sun-kissed buildings elaborated with multi-level towers and turrets rising out of closely packed ksours (one family Kasbahs), ramparts with geometrical drawings and a series of alleys and gateways. There are more than twenty riads, old Moroccan mansions that make up Taourirt.

References

The history above is copied from here

Wiki’s page on the kasbah and town is here