Jewish Heritage Morocco — 10 Days

Land at Casablanca Mohammed V International Airport, where your private Gateway2Morocco driver will be waiting to greet you with a warm welcome. Settle in to your hotel and recover from your journey at your own pace. If you have energy left in the evening, the Corniche of Ain Diab is a five-minute drive — a vibrant seaside boulevard for an easy first walk along the Atlantic.

After breakfast, meet your guide and licensed driver to discover Morocco's largest city. Begin at the magnificent Hassan II Mosque — completed in 1993, partially built over the Atlantic Ocean, and one of the very few mosques in Morocco open to non-Muslim visitors. Continue to the Habous Quarter, a French-built reinterpretation of a traditional medina from the early twentieth century, beside the royal palace and home to the famous Bennis pastry shop. Then turn to Casablanca's living Jewish community: the Museum of Moroccan Judaism, Morocco's longest-established museum of Jewish heritage, and Temple Beth-El, the city's best-known synagogue, with its stained glass and chandeliers. End with a slow walk along the Corniche of Ain Diab, where the Atlantic sets a wide horizon for the evening.

Drive north along the Atlantic to Rabat — Morocco's royal capital — for the Mohammed V Mausoleum (white marble and carved cedar, with Royal Guards on horseback) and the blue-and-white Udayas Kasbah. Continue inland to Volubilis, the UNESCO-listed Roman city: mosaic floors depicting Orpheus and Bacchus still lie where Roman families once walked, and a Hebrew gravestone and a Greek epitaph naming the “head of the synagogue of the Jews”, mostly dated to the third century CE, are among the oldest written traces of Jewish life in Morocco. Arrive in Fes — Morocco's medieval heart — at sunset.

Fes is generally considered the first Moroccan city to have a separate Jewish quarter: the Mellah, beside the Royal Palace in Fes el-Jdid, where the community was moved in the fifteenth century (the date most often given is 1438). With your licensed local guide, walk the mellah's balconied houses along Rue des Mérinides, visit the restored Ibn Danan (Aben Danan) Synagogue, a seventeenth-century synagogue with its carved wooden ark, galleries and ritual bath, and the Jewish cemetery beside the mellah with its rows of whitewashed tombs. After lunch, the rest of Fes el-Bali — the Attarine Medersa, Al-Qarawiyyin (founded in 859 and widely cited as the world's oldest continuously operating university), and the Chouara Tanneries.

Drive south through Ifrane — the alpine Swiss-style town built by the French Protectorate, with stone chalets and a famous snow-covered lion sculpture. Continue through cedar forests where Barbary macaques roam free, then descend through the Ziz Valley — a river gorge with thousands of date palms creating a green canopy above the arid landscape. Arrive in Erfoud, gateway to the Sahara, at sunset.

Explore Rissani — cradle of the Alaouite dynasty, near the ruins of Sijilmasa, the great terminus of the trans-Saharan caravan trade in which Jewish merchants played a part for centuries. The Tafilalet is also the homeland of the Abuhatzeira rabbinic family: the revered Baba Sali, Rabbi Israel Abuhatzeira, was born here, and family shrines stand in the Jewish cemeteries of Rissani and Erfoud. Detour to Khamlia village for a Gnawa music performance, then arrive at the edge of Erg Chebbi, the great dune sea of Merzouga. Mount your camel as the sun begins its descent, the dunes turning gold and amber and red. A desert camp awaits: dinner, drumming and a sky full of stars.

Rise early, climb the dune and watch the desert turn gold. Then travel west through the Berber heartland — past Tinghir's vast date-palm oasis, whose old mellah recalls a Jewish community that lived here until the 1950s and 1960s, a story told in the documentary Tinghir-Jerusalem — to Todra Gorge, where sheer limestone cliffs close in to a narrow canyon. Continue to the Dades Gorge, a wider valley of sculpted red rock formations, and spend the night in a lodge above the valley floor.

Travel the old caravan route through Skoura's palm oasis and past Ouarzazate, where a former synagogue in the old Taourirt quarter recalls the town's Jewish families, to Aït Ben Haddou — the UNESCO-listed earthen ksar seen in Gladiator and dozens of other films. Walk its alleys with your guide up to the hilltop granary for the view. Then cross the Tizi n'Tichka Pass (2,260 m) and descend to Marrakech as the evening lights begin to sparkle below.

Begin in the Mellah of Marrakech, laid out in the late 1550s beside the royal kasbah, where Jewish merchants, craftsmen and royal agents were part of the city's life for four centuries. Visit the Slat al-Azama (Lazama) Synagogue, still in use, which community tradition links to Spanish exiles of 1492, with its blue-and-white tiled courtyard; and the Miâara Jewish Cemetery, one of the largest in Morocco, with its whitewashed tombs and the shrines of revered rabbis. Afternoon: the Saadian Tombs, the Bahia Palace and the medina souks. As dusk falls: Djemaa el-Fna — storytellers, Gnawa musicians and the rising smoke of a hundred food stalls.

A final Moroccan breakfast on the riad terrace, then your private driver takes you to Marrakech Menara Airport. Over ten days you've walked through two thousand years of Jewish heritage — from the Roman foundations of Volubilis, through the medieval mellahs of Fes and Marrakech, to the active synagogues of Casablanca — and seen the country's greatest treasures along the way. Carry it with you.