Toubkal is the highest mountain in North Africa, and you can walk to the top of it. At 4,167 metres it stands above every other point in the Arab world. For much of the year the summit needs no ropes and no technical climbing, only two days, a steady pace and a head for altitude. It rises at the core of Morocco's High Atlas, a few hours from the souks of Marrakech, where the road ends at the Berber village of Imlil at 1,740 metres. From there the mountain is a bare pyramid of broken red-brown rock standing above the last walnut terraces, with no forest and no glacier on it. The summit and the valleys below lie inside Toubkal National Park, and the villages in those valleys have farmed these slopes for centuries.
The climb usually takes two days. From Imlil the path follows the Mizane valley past the hamlet of Aroumd and its terraced walnut groves, then reaches the white-painted boulder of Sidi Chamharouch, still a place of pilgrimage. Above it the valley steepens to the stone Refuge du Toubkal at 3,207 metres. Trekkers sleep there and leave before dawn, headlamps threading up a long rocky corridor to the pyramidal metal marker at the top. From the summit the horizon is a crumpled mass of ridges running south toward the edge of the Sahara, and on clear mornings a sea of cloud spreads out below your boots. It is not a hard climb in summer, but altitude and weather are real, and from roughly November to April the summit corridor holds snow and ice. Since 2019 a licensed local guide is required, hired in Imlil, and passports are checked at points along the trail — a rule brought in after two trekkers were killed near the village in 2018.