From Traveller to Tourist: How Morocco Became a Destination Travel existed long before tourism.
Morocco knew the traveller centuries before anyone thought of packaging Marrakech, Fez, Meknes and Rabat into an itinerary.
The traveller was a familiar figure. He might have been a merchant crossing the Sahara, a scholar travelling from one centre of learning to another, a pilgrim beginning the long journey eastward toward Mecca, a diplomat carrying a message from a sultan, a craftsman seeking work, an exile escaping persecution, an explorer driven by curiosity—or even a spy gathering information for a foreign ruler.
People travelled because they had somewhere to go, something to seek, something to exchange, something to learn, or sometimes something from which to escape. The journey was rarely the product.
It was the road toward something else. Perhaps no Moroccan embodies this older meaning of travel better than Ibn Battuta. When he left Tangier in 1325, at about the age of twenty-one, he was not a tourist departing on an organised journey. He was setting out on pilgrimage. Yet that first intention carried him into one of history's most extraordinary journeys.
For centuries, Moroccans moved through a world connected by pilgrimage, scholarship, diplomacy, commerce and migration. Fez communicated intellectually with centres far beyond Morocco. Caravans travelled south across the Sahara. Mediterranean ports opened toward Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. Pilgrims moved eastward toward the holy cities. Morocco was never isolated.
It was already a country of travellers.
What changed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not the discovery of travel. Something subtler happened.
Morocco itself became the reason for travelling. When Morocco Entered the European Imagination Before Morocco became a tourism destination, it became an imagined destination. European diplomats, military officers, writers, painters, adventurers and explorers had been coming for centuries. But during the nineteenth century, Morocco increasingly occupied a particular place in the European imagination.
It offered proximity and difference at the same time. Europe was only across the Strait of Gibraltar, yet Morocco seemed to many European visitors to belong to another world. Its medinas, souks, clothing, architecture, horses, ceremonies, landscapes, light and public life fascinated painters and writers searching for subjects different from industrialising Europe.
Eugène Delacroix's journey to Morocco in 1832 became particularly influential. Later came other artists associated in different ways with the European fascination for Morocco: Benjamin-Constant, Henri Matisse, Hilda Rix Nicholas and many others. Tangier became one of the great doors through which this encounter took place. For the painter, Morocco offered colour. For the writer, mystery. For the adventurer, the unknown. For European society increasingly fascinated with what it called the Orient, Morocco offered exoticism remarkably close to home. But we should be careful when looking backward. These visitors did not all see the same Morocco, nor did they arrive with the same intentions. Some approached the country with genuine curiosity and admiration. Others inevitably carried the prejudices and hierarchies of nineteenth-century Europe. The intellectual climate of the period often divided humanity into categories such as civilized and primitive, advanced and backward, modern and traditional. Orientalism could produce extraordinary art and scholarship, but it could also turn living societies into objects to be observed, classified and romanticized. And colonialism added another dimension. Europe no longer merely wanted to encounter other worlds. Increasingly, it believed it had the authority to reorganise them. Travel, scholarship, commerce, military expansion and colonial ambition sometimes walked disturbingly close together. Morocco stood at the intersection of all of them. ** Tangier: The Door** Tangier occupied a special place. Geography had already decided much of its destiny. Standing at the entrance to the Mediterranean and looking toward Europe across one of the narrowest maritime crossings between the two continents, Tangier had long been diplomatic, commercial, and strategic. By the beginning of the twentieth century, its international character intensified. The arrangements surrounding the establishment of the French and Spanish protectorates in 1912 left Tangier under a special regime, and in 1923 the Tangier Protocol established the framework for the International Zone.
The result was one of the strangest urban experiments of the twentieth century. Diplomats, businessmen, artists, writers, adventurers, expatriates, wealthy visitors and people seeking freedoms unavailable elsewhere all passed through Tangier. It became international before international tourism had acquired its contemporary meaning. Tangier was not simply visited. It was imagined. And imagination is one of tourism's most powerful engines. Before someone purchases a journey, they must first desire a place.
Marrakech: The Exotic City
If Tangier was the door, Marrakech became one of Morocco's great promises. The ochre walls, palm groves, Atlas Mountains, souks, gardens, storytellers, musicians and great square offered precisely the visual language that early twentieth-century European travellers associated with an exotic Morocco. Yet modern tourism requires more than desire. A destination needs access. It needs transportation. It needs accommodation. It needs information. It needs someone to tell the prospective traveller: Come. This is what you will see. This is where you will stay. This is how you will get there. Under the French Protectorate, these pieces increasingly came together. Hubert Lyautey understood the political and economic value of presenting Morocco to European visitors. Tourism could demonstrate accessibility, order and stability while generating economic activity and strengthening the image of the Protectorate abroad. The gaze of the Orientalist was gradually being joined by something more systematic: destination marketing. Building the Infrastructure of the Tourist The traveller of earlier centuries adapted himself to the road. Modern tourism increasingly adapted the road to the traveller. That distinction matters.
Transport companies connected cities. Roads became more reliable. Shipping companies promoted access from Europe. Railway and motor transport expanded. Guidebooks explained what should be seen. Posters created desire. Hotels offered an environment in which affluent European visitors could encounter Morocco while retaining familiar standards of comfort. The creation of the Central Tourism Committee in 1918 signalled that tourism was no longer merely happening spontaneously. It was becoming something to be organised and promoted. The Guides Bleus helped transform a complicated country into something legible to the visitor: routes, monuments, hotels, distances and recommended circuits. Transport networks performed the same function physically. The establishment of CTM in 1919 helped connect Moroccan cities by modern road transport. Maritime companies such as Compagnie de Navigation Paquet connected Morocco with European ports and helped promote the destination visually. Then came the great hotels. La Mamounia opened in Marrakech in 1923. Palais Jamaï in Fez, created from a former palace, became another prestigious address associated with elite travel. These establishments were more than places to sleep. They represented a new compromise between two worlds: the experience of Morocco with the comforts expected by wealthy international travellers. A visitor could spend the afternoon wandering through a medina and return in the evening to an elegant hotel. Morocco was becoming accessible without becoming entirely familiar. That balance, comfort surrounded by difference, would become one of the enduring formulas of international tourism.
The Birth of the Imperial Cities The expression “Imperial Cities” did not create the historical importance of Fez, Marrakech, Meknes and Rabat. Each had already served as a seat of Moroccan power under different dynasties and periods of the country's history. What changed during the early Protectorate was the way these cities were presented to the foreign traveller. Resident-General Hubert Lyautey, deeply impressed by Morocco's historic cities, pursued a policy of preserving their old medinas while developing new European quarters alongside them. Within the emerging tourism strategy, these former capitals came to be presented collectively as the Villes Impériales — the Imperial Cities.
Early Hachette travel literature, including the Guides Bleus, documented and promoted the circuit, while tourism posters presented it visually to prospective visitors abroad. Roads, motor transport, hotels and guidebooks made it possible to transform four historically distinct capitals into a journey that could be organised, repeated and sold. Moroccan history had created the capitals. Modern tourism turned them into a circuit. That circuit proved remarkably durable. A century later, “The Imperial Cities of Morocco” remains one of the country's best-known itineraries.
The Imperial Cities. The expression fascinated me for years. Fez, Marrakech, Meknes and Rabat were unquestionably historic centres of royal power. Each had served as a capital under different periods and dynasties of Moroccan history. But Moroccans did not create these cities as a tourism circuit. History created four capitals. Tourism connected them into one journey. An old French Guide Bleu from the early 1920s that I have kept among my materials presents the Imperial Cities as an organised circuit. I also possess an early tourism poster promoting the Imperial Cities itinerary. These documents are particularly interesting because they show us something happening almost in front of our eyes. A tourism product was being born. Marrakech could represent the exotic south and the great imperial traditions of the Almoravids, Almohads and Saadians. Fez offered the ancient medina, scholarship, craftsmanship and the legacy of the Idrisids and Marinids. Meknes evoked Moulay Ismail and the ambitions of the early Alaouite state. Rabat combined older dynastic monuments with its new position as the administrative capital. Each city possessed its own history. Tourism gave them a shared name. The Imperial Cities of Morocco. Roads connected them. Guidebooks explained them. Hotels accommodated their visitors. Posters romanticised them. Transport companies moved travellers between them. And tour organisers transformed them into a repeatable itinerary. The importance of this innovation is easy to overlook because the itinerary became so familiar.
A century later, travellers are still purchasing variations of essentially the same journey. Sarah Tours itself has offered Imperial Cities journeys. The route survived empires, independence, aviation, package tourism, the internet and social media. That tells us something about the extraordinary durability of a well-created travel narrative. The Invention of the Destination This is where we should distinguish carefully between history and tourism. The French did not discover Fez. They did not create Marrakech. They did not give Meknes its imperial history. They did not make Rabat historically important. These cities possessed their civilizations long before modern European tourism existed. What the emerging tourism industry did was something different. It selected. Connected. Named. Interpreted. Promoted. It transformed places into destinations and destinations into itineraries. That process is still at the heart of tourism today. A country contains thousands of places. Tourism chooses which ones the visitor is told to desire. Edith Wharton and the Written Morocco Writers also played an important role in this transformation. Edith Wharton travelled through Morocco in 1917 as the guest of Resident-General Lyautey. Her subsequent book, In Morocco, introduced the country to a substantial English-speaking readership. Her Morocco is fascinating precisely because it sits at the intersection of travel literature, Orientalist fascination and the political environment of the Protectorate. This is why travel writing deserves attention in the history of tourism. Before photographs fill websites and videos circulate instantly around the world, someone must create the Morocco that exists in the imagination of the person who has never been there. Writers did that. Painters did that. Later photographers and poster designers did it. Today Instagram, YouTube and travel websites do it. The technology changed. The principle did not. We travel twice: first in imagination, then in geography. From Exploration to Organisation By the early twentieth century, therefore, many of the essential components of modern Moroccan tourism were appearing together. There was an international image of Morocco. There were gateways. There were transportation networks. There were prestigious hotels. There were guidebooks. There were tourism institutions. There were posters. And increasingly, there were defined itineraries. The traveller was becoming a tourist. This did not mean curiosity disappeared. Nor did it mean every visitor suddenly became superficial. It meant that travel could increasingly be purchased as an organised experience. Someone else had selected the route. Someone else had identified the monuments. Someone else had chosen the hotel. Someone else had calculated the time. Someone else had decided what constituted the Morocco worth seeing. The uncertainty of travel was gradually being replaced by the architecture of tourism.
Then Another Traveller Appeared But history rarely moves in a straight line. By the 1960s and 1970s, another generation began arriving in Morocco. They were young. They travelled cheaply. They came in Citroën 2CVs, Volkswagen campers, vans, motorcycles, converted buses and those extraordinary overland trucks that fascinated me as a teenager. Many rejected precisely the highly organised tourism their parents' generation had embraced. They wanted the road again. They wanted unpredictability. They wanted contact. They wanted to stay longer and spend less. They wanted to cross borders rather than fly over them. And, once again, Morocco was waiting at Europe's doorstep. I know this generation intimately because it was through them that tourism entered my own life. One morning, when I was still a schoolboy in Fez, I found young European travellers camping near the entrance to our family farm. Later, our farm became informally known among travellers as a place where one could camp. The instructions were apparently simple: “Go there and ask for Hamid.” Then came the overland trucks at Bab Khokha near my high school. Guerba, Sundowners, Insight, Capricorn, Contiki and later Topdeck are among the names I remember from that remarkable period. I stared at those vehicles and dreamed of travelling in them. Eventually, I did. I became a licensed guide in 1974, travelled throughout Morocco and later across Africa, and led journeys that sometimes lasted for months. That generation taught me another meaning of travel. The traveller did not have to stand outside a culture and look at it. He could walk inside it. Anthropology Before Anthropology Years later, I formally studied anthropology. But the road had already begun my education. Travelling slowly taught me to listen. Camping taught me that comfort and richness of experience are not the same thing. Crossing borders taught me that cultures appear much simpler from a distance than they do when you live among people. Guiding taught me something else. I did not enjoy standing in front of travellers and asking them to follow me. I preferred walking beside them. Eventually I understood why. I wasn't showing them Morocco. I was sharing my culture with them. That distinction would eventually become central to my philosophy of travel. When Tourism Became an Industry The decades that followed transformed tourism again. Commercial aviation made distant destinations accessible to millions. Package tours reduced uncertainty. Large hotels expanded. International brands arrived. Cruise ships grew. Online booking changed distribution. Review platforms changed reputation. Low-cost airlines changed geography. And finally smartphones changed the traveller's relationship with the unknown. Tourism became one of the world's great industries. This brought enormous benefits. Millions of people who could never have undertaken the journeys of Ibn Battuta—or even the overland travellers of the 1970s—could encounter other countries and cultures. Tourism created employment. It supported hotels, restaurants, guides, drivers, artisans and countless small businesses. It connected people who otherwise might never have met. But scale also introduced dangers. Places could become products. Cultures could become performances. Hospitality could become transactions. Communities could receive visitors without receiving a fair share of tourism's benefits. Nature could become scenery to be consumed. And the traveller could return home with thousands of photographs without ever truly encountering the place photographed. The tourist had conquered distance. But sometimes distance remained between people. Can the Tourist Become a Traveller Again? This, for me, is the question facing tourism today. I do not believe we should romanticise the past. The old roads were uncomfortable. Travel could be dangerous. Information was scarce. Many people simply could not afford to travel. Modern tourism has democratised experiences that were once available only to aristocrats, adventurers or people willing to endure considerable hardship. I do not want to return to 1923. Nor do I want to recreate 1973. I want to preserve something both periods can teach us. Curiosity. The willingness to encounter rather than merely consume. The humility to enter another person's country as a guest. The patience to listen before judging. The understanding that the people serving our meal, driving our vehicle, weaving our carpet or opening their village to us are not part of the scenery. They are our hosts. And they have as much right to benefit from the journey as we do. From Tourist to Guest Perhaps, then, the next evolution of tourism is not technological. Perhaps it is human. We began with the traveller. We created the tourist. Perhaps now we need to rediscover the guest. A guest arrives with curiosity but also respect. A guest understands that hospitality creates obligations on both sides. A guest does not ask merely: What can I take from this place? but also: What relationship am I entering by being here? That is where responsible and sustainable travel begin for me. Not with slogans. With relationships. The traveller should benefit. The guide should benefit. The driver should benefit. The hotel and restaurant should benefit. The artisan and farmer should benefit. The local community should benefit. The natural environment should not pay the price for everybody else's profit. And the culture should remain more than a performance staged for outsiders. Travel succeeds when the encounter leaves both host and guest richer. A Century After the Imperial Cities There is something wonderfully circular about this story. A century ago, an early traveller could open a Guide Bleu, discover the Imperial Cities and set out toward Marrakech, Rabat, Meknes and Fez. Today, someone can open a telephone thousands of kilometres away and book essentially the same route in minutes. The roads are better. The hotels are more comfortable. The vehicles are faster. The information is almost limitless. But the fundamental question has not changed: Why are you travelling? If the answer is simply to collect places, tourism can provide them efficiently. But if the answer is to understand something beyond ourselves, then we must recover some of the spirit of the traveller. Morocco has been receiving strangers for centuries. Pilgrims passed through it. Merchants traded in it. Scholars studied in it. Diplomats negotiated in it. Painters imagined it. Colonial administrators reorganised it. Tourists photographed it. Overlanders crossed it. And millions of visitors continue to arrive every year. Each generation invented its own Morocco. But Morocco was always more complicated than the image created for it. Perhaps that is the responsibility of travel today: not merely to see Morocco, but to allow Morocco to reveal itself. That is the kind of travel I still believe in. It is the reason I remained in tourism. It is the reason I created Sarah Tours. And after more than half a century of travelling, guiding, studying and listening, I find myself returning to something I learned almost accidentally as a young man in Fez: The best journey is not one in which the guide walks ahead and the tourist follows behind. It is one in which we walk beside one another. Perhaps tourism does not need another invention. Perhaps it simply needs to remember the traveller from whom it came.
