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Across Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, a Hotel That Changed My Sense of Luxury

At Dar Ahlam in Morocco's Skoura oasis, there’s no itinerary and no concept of time—and that turned out to be the point.

My first trip to Morocco was long overdue. I had initially meant to go after Covid, but the trip kept slipping, and when a visit finally came together in late 2023, the devastating Al Haouz earthquake that September—magnitude 6.8, nearly 3,000 killed in the Atlas Mountains and surrounding provinces—made the timing impossible. Two and a half years later, the invitation came again, and I was not going to let it pass for a third time. La Mamounia, Marrakech’s most iconic hotel and arguably the country’s most famous, was the only place to start a trip this long in the making. I spent two nights there before heading south, and within an hour of check-in at La Mamounia, where rooms start around $900 a night, I understood why the place has maintained such a hold on jet-setters since 1923. 

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A century-old palace in the Hivernage district with eight acres of gardens so fragrant they bottle the scent and sell it in the lobby, La Mamounia needs no introduction. This is where Churchill painted watercolors from the balconies, and more than 80 years later, where Anna Delvey allegedly ran up $62,000 on her friend’s credit card—and where Netflix returned to film the wreckage. 

But I had not come to Morocco to confirm what a palace hotel already knows about itself. I had come to find out whether the country’s glamour ran deeper than the marble, and whether something on the other side of the Atlas Mountains could make the case that luxury had been asking the wrong questions all along.

Part of why I traveled to Morocco was to see both sides of the geographic divide. The Marrakech side, where the medina swallows you whole—you lose your bearings every three minutes, light comes down in slats through latticed wood, and the souks compress centuries of commerce into alleyways barely wide enough for two. And then the other Morocco, reached only by crossing the High Atlas at 7,400 feet, where the valleys open so wide the horizon bends, and the kasbahs rise out of the earth as if they grew there.

The Tizi n’Tichka pass is four hours of switchbacks—a motorized Oregon Trail where the gold at the end is a mud fortress and mint tea. You descend through Ouarzazate, a filming destination known as Africa’s Hollywood, past the studios where Ridley Scott built his Colosseum for Gladiator. The day I crossed, hurricane-force winds shut traffic near the summit. Cars rocked. A window shattered somewhere behind us. My driver, who had clearly done this before, stepped out and stood calmly by the roadside in case the car decided to become a toboggan. I stayed in the back seat watching dust swallow the road, Googling whether my travel insurance covered acts of God in a country I had........

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