Todgha Gorge
Interesting facts
- The upper cliffs of the gorge are Jurassic limestone, lifted high when the collision of Africa and Europe raised the High Atlas.
- Over its length the canyon swings from a slot about 10 metres across to a valley close to a kilometre wide.
- The floor of the gorge lies at roughly 1,500 metres above sea level, high in the eastern High Atlas.
- The Todgha and the neighbouring Dadès rivers have each cut a chain of limestone canyons through the last forty or so kilometres of their mountain course.
- Local climbers count more than 400 bolted routes in dozens of sectors, graded from easy 4a to extreme 8c on the French scale.
Why it is worth it
Above the town of Tinghir, the Todgha river has sawn its way out of the eastern High Atlas through a wall of limestone, and in its last few hundred metres the result is one of the most theatrical passages in Morocco. The canyon runs for more than twenty kilometres in all, but the famous part is short: here the cliffs close in to a corridor barely ten metres wide, and pale, smooth rock rises almost vertically on either side for well over a hundred metres, and elsewhere in the gorge to around three hundred. At midday a strip of sky is all that is left; in early morning and late afternoon the walls turn gold and rose while the floor stays in shade.
The approach is as much a part of the place as the narrows. Upstream from Tinghir the valley is filled by a long, dense palm grove, one of the greenest in southern Morocco. Earth-built ksour, the fortified villages of the Amazigh (Berber) oases, such as Tizgui and Ait Tizgui, stand along its edges, their mud walls the same colour as the hills behind. Walking a stretch of the palm grove, on the paths between the irrigation channels, shows how completely life here depends on the water that comes out of the gorge.
The river itself is modest for most of the year and the canyon floor can be nearly dry, but after storms in the mountains it becomes a torrent, which is how it carved the gorge in the first place. The clean, sheer limestone has made Todgha one of the best-known rock-climbing areas in Morocco, with several hundred bolted routes on the walls, and hiking trails lead through the canyon and out into the side valleys and villages around it.
Getting there
The narrows lie about 15 km north of Tinghir along the paved R703; shared grand taxis run up the valley from the town centre. The nearest airport in a straight line is Beni Mellal Airport (BEM), about 113 km away on the far side of the High Atlas; in practice most visitors arrive by road from Ouarzazate or Marrakech, often as part of a route along the Dadès and Todgha valleys.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Todgha Gorges are a series of limestone river canyons, or wadi, in the eastern part of the High Atlas Mountains in Morocco, near the town of Tinghir. Both the Todgha River and the neighbouring Dadès River are responsible for carving out these deep cliff-sided canyons, on their final 40 kilometres (25 mi) through the mountains. The height of the canyon walls can vary, but in some places can be up to 400 metres (1,312 ft) high.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
31.58830, -5.59340per Wikidata