Walking in Gorges du Toudra in the High Atlas mountains

Toudra Gorge is one of the detour from our 3-day road trip from Mezouga to Essaouira. See earlier post here.

The Toudra Gorge (or Todgha Gorge, Gorges du Toudra; in Tamazight: ⵜⵉⵣⵉ ⵏ ⵜⵓⴷⵖⴰ; Arabic: مضيق تودغا‌‎) are a series of limestone river canyons, in the eastern part of the High Atlas Mountains, near the town of Tinghir.

A local guide took us for a walk along the canyon floor, through palmeraies and one of the villages, and we crossed the Oued Todra several times.

We did not go further upstream, but we read that the canyon narrows to a flat stony track, in places as little as 10 metres (33 ft) wide.

Lonely Planet said that the best time to visit is in the morning when the sunshine briefly illuminates the gorge in a golden moment of welcome. Well, we were there late in the afternoon and saw the warm rays of sunset lighting up the upper halves of the cliff face.

We walked along and on the banks of irrigation channels by which river water is diverted into the fields of vegetables, and almond trees and walnut trees. The almond trees which flower in early spring were blooming.

Our local guide spoke English well and told us a lot about stem grafting to propagate the almond trees.

We walked through a Berber village with abandoned mud brick houses. Berbers are an ethnicity of several nations mostly indigenous to North Africa and some northern parts of West Africa.

The Moroccan Constitution, amended in 2011, lists Tamazight the language spoken by Berbers as an official language together with Arabic. In June 2019, Moroccan lawmakers approved a bill requiring Tamazight to be taught to all Moroccan students.

One of the main characteristic of Tamazight that has confused Tamazight speakers is that there are many dialects. Tamazight has three major varieties. Tashlhit, Tamazight and Tarifit. And each of these dialects consists of many sub-dialects.

The teaching of Tamazight is now accompanied with the Tifinagh alphabet (neo-tifinagh), which many Tamazight speakers still aren’t familiar with, having been accustomed to write the language in the Arabic or Latin alphabet. A modernized form of the Tifinagh alphabet was made official in Morocco in 2003. Before this point Tamazight did not have a literacy tradition, even though it has had a written tradition going back 2500 years.

This is Tifinagh written in Tifinagh ⵜⵉⴼⵉⵏⴰⵖ . Tifinagh has been added to Unicode Standard in 2015 and its block range is U+2D30–U+2D7F. We hope your computer can support the display of these codes, otherwise you would have been seeing boxes.

For many years, giving children Amazigh names was forbidden in Morocco, and administrators would often refuse to enter these names into the civil registries. The effect of such a ban was the exclusion of those who speak the language – usually people from poor, rural areas of the country – from participation in various aspects of public life.

Apparently during the high tourist season, souvenir stands and tour buses clog the road.  We did not see anything close to regular vehicular traffic or even a piece of souvenir, lucky us.

Can you see Sue and the guide ahead of me in the photo above ? The vertical rock faces offer excellent rock-climbing routes. Something that we were not going to be able to enjoy.

Our driver was waiting for us further upstream at a scenic spot. We had a nice, gentle 90-minute walk while the sun was slowly setting behind the mountain.

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