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Guelmim

GOULIMINE (also spelled Guelmim or Gulimime) sounds pretty exciting in the brochures: “The Gateway to the Sahara”, with its nomadic “blue men” and traditional camel market. The truth, sadly, it is considerably mundane. Goulimine is actually a fairly standard administrative town with a distinctly frontier feel to it, and a couple of small, fairly animated souks.

Though the scenery is indeed impressively bleak, you’re still a long way short of seeing any Saharan dunes, and Goulimine’s Saturday souk, known as the camel market, is a rather depressing sham, maintained largely for tour groups bused in from Agadir. The market has all the usual Moroccan goods on sale: grain, vegetables, meat, clothes, silver, jewelery, sheep and goats. What it doesn’t have in very great numbers is camels, as the beasts have steadily fallen from favor over the years in the wake of lorries and transit vehicles, and the caravan routes are more or less extinct. The few you do see here have been brought in either just for show or to be sold off for meat. If you are interested, the market is held a kilometer out of town on the road to Tan Tan; it starts around 6am and a couple of hours later the first tour buses arrive. A second market, just off Avenue des FAR, sells mainly food and is open evenings only.

The locals have recently begun to indulge in theatrical cons, ferrying people out to see “genuine homl’nes bleus” in tents outside town, but for a more convincing and exciting sense of the desert, you would do a lot better to make for M’hamid in the Draa or Merzouga in the Tafilalt. Guelmim

The one time that a visit to Guelmim would be worthwhile in itself is if you could coincide with one of the region’s annual moussems – when you really are likely to see Touareg nomads. It’s difficult to get information about the exact dates of the moussems – they vary considerably from year to year – but there is usually a large one held in June at Asrir, 10km southeast of Gulimime.

Moussems and markets aside, the nearest thing Guelmim has to a tourist sight is the remains of Caid Dahman Takni’s palace, in the back streets behind the Hotel la Jeunesse, ruined now but barely a hundred years old.

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