11 Best Beaches in Morocco

I first visited Morocco when I was 20, and the first place I ever set foot was Essaouira—a windswept fishing town that had absolutely nothing to do with the Morocco I'd pictured beforehand. 

Most people who visit stick firmly to the cities and the mountains, ticking off Marrakech's souks and the peaks of the Atlas, and I understand why, but the coastline gets nowhere near enough credit. 

I've been returning over the past decade, and Morocco has stayed one of my favorite countries precisely because of what sits along its edges—whether you want to surf, relax completely, or just wander somewhere half-wild. These are the 11 beaches I always send people to.

This is where it all started for me, and I still think it's one of the most atmospheric beaches in the country. The wind that made this coastline famous for windsurfing and kitesurfing rolls in most afternoons, so mornings are the calmer window if you'd rather just walk the sand than get battered by a gale. 

The medina backs right onto the beach, with its blue shutters and whitewashed walls, and I learned early on that the best seafood isn't in the restaurants lining the port but at the small stalls just past the fishing boats, where you point at what's fresh and they grill it in front of you for a fraction of the price.

Legzira is famous for its red rock arches carved out of the cliffs by the Atlantic, though one of the two collapsed in 2016, which makes seeing the remaining arch feel a little more urgent than it used to. 

It sits near Sidi Ifni on the southern coast, and the color of the rock against the water at sunset is something I've never quite managed to photograph properly. 

Locals will tell you the light is best about an hour before sunset rather than during it, when the cliffs turn a deeper, almost burnt orange before the crowds who've timed it for the exact sunset moment even arrive.

Taghazout is Morocco's best-known surf town, and for good reason—the point breaks here are honestly world-class, with Anchor Point drawing surfers from all over. 

As well as exploring the waves, I've spent plenty of afternoons in the rooftop cafés overlooking the water, watching the lineup from above. 

The village itself has grown a lot since I first passed through (it’s all yoga retreats and smoothie bowls now) but walk 15 minutes north along the coast road and you'll find quieter breaks with a fraction of the crowd, plus a few local surf shacks that will rent you a board for less than half what the main strip charges.

Oualidia is the calmest beach on this entire list, sitting inside a lagoon that's almost entirely protected from the Atlantic swell, which makes it perfect if you want to actually swim rather than dodge waves. 

It's known across Morocco for its oyster farms, and I make a point of eating a plate of them fresh, with just a squeeze of lemon, at one of the small shacks right on the water whenever I'm passing through. 

The lagoon is shallow enough at low tide that you can walk out a surprising distance, and locals fish for clams in the sand here in a way that feels almost unchanged in decades.

True to its name, Plage Blanche is an enormous stretch of pale sand running for kilometers near Sidi Ifni, and it's remote enough that I've had entire sections of it completely to myself. 

There's very little infrastructure out here, which is part of the appeal, though it also means you should bring water and food rather than counting on finding either. 

A local guide once told me the best access point is via the small village of Mirleft rather than the more obvious routes, since it avoids a long stretch of soft sand that can bog down a car.

Imsouane has one of the longest right-hand point breaks in the world, and unlike Taghazout, it's managed to stay a proper fishing village rather than turning into a surf resort. 

I love arriving here in the early morning when the boats are heading out and the beach still belongs to the fishermen rather than the surf schools. The bay itself is split into two—a sheltered inner harbor good for beginners, and the longer outer point for anyone with more experience—and asking at any of the small guesthouses will get you pointed toward which side suits the day's swell.

Asilah sits near Tangier on the north coast, and its whitewashed medina is covered in murals that change every summer during an annual arts festival, giving the whole town a completely different feel from anywhere else on this list. 

The beach itself stretches out just beyond the old town walls, wide and easy, with far fewer tourists than you'd expect given how photogenic the place is. I always time a visit for late afternoon, when the light hits the mural walls and the fishermen start bringing in the day's catch along the ramparts above the sand.

Achakar sits near Cap Spartel, the point where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Mediterranean Sea, and there's something striking about standing on the sand knowing two oceans are colliding just off the coast. 

The Caves of Hercules are a short walk away and worth the detour, with an opening carved into the cliff that's said to resemble a map of Africa. 

Most day-trippers come from Tangier just to see the caves and skip the beach entirely, so if you stay past the tour buses leaving, you'll often have the sand almost entirely to yourself for the last hour of daylight.

Sidi Kaouki sits just south of Essaouira, and I started going whenever I wanted the wildness of that coastline without any of the town's crowds. It's a proper windsurfing and kitesurfing spot, with strong, reliable wind and a long stretch of open sand backed by dunes rather than buildings. 

There's a handful of small guesthouses and not much else, which is exactly the draw. A friend who lives out there once showed me a trail behind the dunes that leads to a freshwater spring where local women still come to wash clothes, a detail that's stuck with me more than almost anything else from that trip.

Al Hoceima sits on Morocco's Mediterranean coast in the Rif region, and the water here is a completely different color from anywhere on the Atlantic side—clear turquoise coves backed by dramatic cliffs. Much of the coastline falls within a national park, which has kept development minimal and the water fairly clean. 

I'd recommend hiring a small boat from the port to reach some of the coves that aren't accessible by road at all, since the best swimming spots here are tucked between headlands that you simply can't walk to.

Dakhla is the outlier on this list, a lagoon deep in the Western Sahara where the desert meets the ocean in a way that still doesn't feel real to me even after visiting twice. 

It's become one of the world's top kitesurfing destinations thanks to flat, shallow water and near-constant wind, but even if you don't kitesurf, watching the colors shift across the lagoon at sunset is worth the long journey south alone. 

Getting there takes real commitment—it's a full day's drive or a flight from Marrakech—but a local kite instructor once told me the water here reflects the sky so precisely at dusk that it's nearly impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins, and I've never seen anything since that proved him wrong.