IFRANE

Although Azrou with its major Tuesday weekly market has historically been the largest town in the area, the provincial capital is the smaller town of Ifrane. I will come back to modern Ifrane in a minute, first of all some words about earlier history.



The name of the town is pronounced ‘ee-fran’ (not if’rain) and in the Tamazight language this means caves. There’s a lot of limestone in the area so there are many natural caves, and the first settlement in this area 500 years ago was in the Tizguit valley a few km to the north west of modern Ifrane where cave dwellings were hollowed out of the soft limestone. This troglodyte village is mistakenly named on Google Maps as Zaouiat d’ Ifrane, but its actual name is Zaouiat Sidi Abdeslam (the proper Zaouiat Ifrane is 80km to the south west and has been mentioned in earlier posts on this thread).





I live part of the year in an old cave house in southern Spain and it was interesting to note the common factors such as the mangers (animal feed troughs) carved out of the cave walls. The caves in the Ifrane area are still in use for storerooms and animal shelters and nowadays the locals have built houses on the front in an ‘out build’ so it’s not at all obvious that there are caves behind or below.

Dr Eric Ross from Al Akhawayn University showed me around the village and caves and has written about them here.

Ifrane was constructed in the 1920s during the French Protectorate as a ‘hill station’ to escape the summer heat of Fez. Modelled on similar stations such as ‘Snooty’ Ooty in British India, it was planned as a garden city. I can truly say it is a town unlike any other in Morocco, with wide boulevards, lots of greenery, water gardens and a top golf course. Golf in Africa might raise eyebrows, but the Middle Atlas isn’t short of water, it’s known as ‘The Tower of Water’ as all of Morocco’s major rivers rise in these mountains. 





In the summer months many families take 'piques-niques' to the water meadows of the Oued Tizguit with burbling streams and the Chutes de la Vierge waterfall set amongst the trees.



At about 1700m, Ifrane (as well as Azrou) gets a regular dusting of snow in Feb/March and to make the summer retreat as much like France as possible, the houses were built in the style of the French Vosges Alps, with very steeply sloping roofs which easily shed snow.

A royal palace was built for the King, together with an airport which is used almost 100% for royal and government flights. A massive carving of a lion on the main street attracts many photos as it is said to have been carved by an Italian prisoner-of-war during WWII, but in reality it dates from the early 1930s.

In 1989 there was a massive spill from an Iranian oil tanker that threatened fishing and tourism and the Saudi King Fahd created a generous endowment of $50 million to clean it up. And then nature intervened and the slicks were blown out to sea. King Fahd told the Moroccan King Hassan II to keep the money and it was decided to build a university set in the mountains which would be called Al Akhawayn, or 'The Brothers' after the two Kings. The faculty is modelled on American universities, with a wide curriculum and all classes taught in English.

Prince Charles is an avid student of Islam and regards his role as a future King as 'defender of faiths' (plural) rather than just the 'Defender of Faith' (Church of England). He was a visitor to the University in 1996 shortly after it was inaugurated, and again in 2011.



A very short video clip from my visit in 2018 with the British Moroccan Society, showing the beautiful buildings.

Dr Eric Ross is Professor of Geography at Al Akhawayn University and his blog on Ifrane has a lot of detailed information including not surprisingly, more detail on geology.

Ifrane is very clean and modern and probably a fun place to attend university, but for me personally there is not so much interest in the town as in Azrou, so whilst I've visited many times I've not stayed overnight.

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"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)