I met John in the lobby of the El Ati hotel in Erfoud, Morocco’s tourist-desert city. The Englishman who called himself a modern troubadour had just made a trip through the Dades Valley and Canyon where countless historic mud fortresses called kasbahs dot the landscape. When I asked what he thought of these trademarks of Morocco, he answered in poetry:

Kasbahs, melting under torrential rain,
Kasbahs repaired to rise and live again,
Kasbahs sprouting new, small and grand,
Fairytale forts, built by magical hands.

The next morning our group of five followed in John’s footsteps as we made our way westward from Erfoud to explore kasbah land ourselves

Morocco was a French protectorate from 1912 and achieved independence in 1956. The full Arabic name of this Kingdom in northwestern Africa is Al-Maghreb (“The West”) and widely used in Arabic. Morocco, as the country is called in most other languages, derives from the name of the former capital, Marrakech.

It is believed that the Arab tribes, which came from Yemen, brought with them the art of building kasbahs (from Arabic qasbah for “citadel”) because the same type of fortress-castle is still being constructed there.

Hotel El Ati in Morocco's tourist-desert city of Erfoud

In the oases land of southern Morocco, this form of building took a firm hold. Built from the soil of the countryside, which is mixed with straw, kasbahs cost very little — ideal for people who have hardly any money to spare. They fuse traditional Berber battlement exterior building techniques with finely decorated interiors inspired by the Andalusian palaces of Moorish Spain.

Men of modest means construct their small homes kasbah-style, while the powerful and affluent erect huge fortress structures as a sign of wealth, which are considered the true kasbahs.

After a leisurely three-hour drive through a sparsely settled, semi-desert land we reached Tinerhir — a rich agriculture town of 10,000, some one hundred miles (160 km) west of Erfoud. Set in a fertile valley amidst some of the most beautiful landscape in Morocco, it is the door to the Todra Gorges, Morocco’s most famous natural wonder.

As we drove northward, our driver first stopped atop a cliff to let us enjoy the splendid view of the green valley below. Thousands of fruit trees dominated by countless palms were intermixed with fields of grain. A galaxy of gold-colored kasbahs, a good number newly built, contrasting with the silver-green of the olive trees, the deep green of the date palms and the emerald green of carpet-like grain fields, made it an unforgettable sight.

A short distance onward, we reached the Todra Gorges — probably the most impressive geological formation in Northern Africa. Two steep limestone cliffs rise vertically through gray, green, yellow and red rock to 984 feet (300 m), towering above the gravel base of the canyon, which is at its narrowest point only 33 feet (10 m) wide. A small crystal-clear stream runs through it, reputed for curing sterility in women.

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We spent an hour examining the gorge, then returned to Tinerhir to relish this oasis town nestled in a surrounding of olives, pomegranates, date palms and a large number of Kasbahs. Here, we also found the ruins of one of T'hami El Glaoui’s mud castles. El Glaoui was a Berber chief, a French-supported warlord and pasha from Marrakech who controlled large parts of southern Morocco from 1912-1955.

Westward from Tinerhir, we drove for half an hour through a barren landscape until we reached Boumalane — noted for its fantastic-looking Hotel el-Madayeq, built kasbah-style of course, and overlooking the town. After examining this superb structure, we took the road which led to the Dades Canyon, an awesome and torturous limestone gorge with dizzying cliffs, dotted with bizarre rock formations resembling melted wax. It was a rough, jagged universe, a mixture of mauve, purple, red and other colors.