Best Berber Food in Ouarzazate — Amazigh Cooking of the South

The food around Ouarzazate is rooted in Amazigh (Berber) tradition, shaped by the harsh, beautiful landscape of oases, kasbahs and desert. It is resourceful, warming cooking built on what the land provides: slow-cooked meat and vegetable tagines, hearty soups, dates and almonds from the oases, and rustic barley and corn breads baked in wood ovens. Meals are generous and communal, often eaten from a shared dish, and hospitality — a glass of sweet mint tea pressed on every guest — is central to the culture.

A dish to seek out across the Moroccan south-east is medfouna, sometimes called 'Berber pizza' — a round of dough stuffed with spiced minced meat, onions, almonds and herbs, then baked until golden. Native to the Tafilalt oasis region further east but found across the desert south, it is a festive, filling speciality quite different from the everyday tagine. Alongside it, look for berkoukes (a hearty pasta-pearl soup), rich date-based sweets, and tagines sweetened with the oasis fruit.

The nearby Draa Valley and Skoura palm groves supply superb dates, and the wider region grows almonds, saffron (from Taliouine to the west) and roses (from the Valley of Roses to the north-east), all of which flavour southern Moroccan cooking. Traditional Berber meals in guesthouses, kasbah-hotels and desert camps around Ouarzazate are the best way to taste this cuisine at its most authentic, often cooked over wood or coals.

To eat Berber food well, choose a traditional guesthouse or kasbah-hotel meal, seek out medfouna if you can, and embrace the communal, unhurried style. This is the honest, hospitable cooking of the Moroccan south — a world away from the refined tables of the imperial cities, and all the more memorable for it.