Atlas Mountains, Morocco

Kasbah du Toubkal

Price per night from$200.15

Price information

If you haven’t entered any dates, the rate shown is provided directly by the hotel and represents the cheapest double room (including tax) available in the next 60 days.

Prices have been converted from the hotel’s local currency (EUR185.00), via openexchangerates.org, using today’s exchange rate.

Style

Berber castle retreat

Setting

High in the High Atlas

High above sea level, the Kasbah du Toubkal looks out over three major valleys carved from majestic rocky mountains rising to over 4,000 metres. Near the foot of the highest peak in North Africa, it's only 40 miles from Marrakech, but the peace and quiet and seclusion are so complete the city seems a million miles away.
 

Smith Extra

Get this when you book through us:

A pair of Berber slippers

Facilities

Photos Kasbah du Toubkal facilities

Need to know

Rooms

14, including a house with three ensuite double rooms.

Check–Out

10am, but you may be able to stay later if availability permits. Check-in: 2pm. The hotel's off-site reception in Imlil village is staffed 9am–5pm; out of hours, call +212 (0)524 48 56 11.

Prices

Double rooms from £166.45 (€194), including tax at 5 per cent.

More details

Rates include breakfast. Two-night minimum stay.

Also

Mule-trekking can be arranged, starting at €15 for a half day.

At the hotel

Basic but adequate. Traditional Berber-style hammam, with a cauldron of piping water.

Our favourite rooms

The Garden Apartment, the Ifri suite, has its own lounge, terrace and balcony. The garden house has a 12-metre glass wall and a balcony looking up to the waterfalls and High Atlas mountains. All other accommodation is comfortable, but more basic.

Packing tips

Your trustiest walking boots.

Also

Two-night minimum stay. All bills incur a five per cent charge that benefits Village Association community projects. Transfers to/from Marrakech (60km) cost €85.

Children

Families will have fun taking over the Garden House as it has three rooms which link together.

Food and Drink

Photos Kasbah du Toubkal food and drink

Top Table

The top terrace in summer; snuggled up by the fire in winter.

Hotel restaurant

Food is very simple Moroccan cuisine, with a lunchtime set menu for €15, and €20 at dinner.

Hotel bar

Berber tradition dictates that no alcohol is served on the premises. You can bring your own with you so long as you’re happy to serve yourselves.

Last orders

Lunch, 1.30pm; dinner, 8.30pm.

Room service

No room service except in the Garden House or Apartment Suite, but mint tea, coffee and soft drinks are available throughout the day.

Location

Photos Kasbah du Toubkal location
Address
Kasbah du Toubkal
Imlil, Asni
Asni
IMLIL
Morocco

Planes

The nearest airport is Marrakech’s Menara Airport – fly there from the UK and other cities in Europe with British Airways (www.ba.com), Royal Air Maroc (www.royalairmaroc.com), EasyJet (www.easyjet.com) and Ryanair (www.ryanair.com). Transfers from the airport take around 90 minutes.

Automobiles

Driving in Morocco can be daunting, but it's easier outside of the congested cities. Pick up a hire car at the airport from Avis (www.avis.com). From Marrakech, follow the road signposted to Tahannaoute and Asni for about 42km until you reach Asni. As you leave Asni take the turning on the left, continuing for 17km until you arrive at Imlil where you can park up in the town’s free car park. The hotel’s remote reception is 20m further along the road. It's staffed between 9am and 5pm, but out of hours you’ll need to call +212 0)524 485611 to arrange for someone to meet you. It's a 15-minute walk up the hill (but your luggage will be carried by a trusty mule).

Worth getting out of bed for

The Toubkal Lodge allows guests of the Kasbah to stay overnight up the mountain without camping or staying with locals (though that can be a terrific if not conventionally romantic experience). A chain of lodges is planned, all built in the architectural style of the surrounding villages: this is the first, in the village of Id-Issa. With underfloor heating, four ensuite rooms, and spectacular views from the terrace and the lounge, which has a wood-burning stove and music facilities, this is a very comfortable way to enjoy the Atlas Mountains. The usual thing is to trek to the lodge and trek out. There is a dirt road if you're not into the activity side of heading for the hills. To book the whole lodge costs €725 a night half board, or €210 per room. A full day's trekking to get there or back again, including a Berber team with a registered guide, and cook/muleteer to make your picnic lunch, is €75 a person. A 4x4 transfer costs €120 for up to four people.

 

Local restaurants

There are a number of generic local cafes and food stalls in Asni and Imlil but you won't find anything more refined than honest fuel-stops up in the mountains.

Reviews

Photos Kasbah du Toubkal reviews

Anonymous review

Reviewed by Richard Evans.

It’s all about the whumpf, for us. When it comes to choosing where to scoot off to for a break, our first bit of wanderlust chat always revolves around the question of how quickly after arriving at the hotel are we likely to experience that deep inhalation telling us that we’ve just – as someone in the Eighties first put it – taken it down a thousand.

Better-travelled pals have been celebrating the Atlas Mountains for years, saying it’s the dreamiest, most dramatic place within a few hours of London. Our heads badly craving that faraway feeling, we landed in Marrakech, and then taxied straight out; we pitched up 90 minutes later at our Berber base, Kasbah du Toubkal. Whumpf. A mere seven hours after leaving Islington.

The Kasbah isn’t your usual Smith escape, and, when we arrived, the effortlessly genial staff were at pains to make clear that this is no luxury hotel. What Kasbah du Toubkal is, is an utterly charming, very comfortable but not remotely trendy, place for us to base ourselves for a couple of days trekking in the High Atlas; what it lacks in glamour and sparkle it makes up for in warmth and authenticity. And it got right under our skin.

Located at the base of North Africa’s highest peak – Jbel Toubkal – it feels right that our temporary home’s mountain surroundings courses through the hotel’s veins. Not only do the various terraces and rooms have genuinely awesome views – snow-capped mountains on one side, and the dusty valley and ancient villages on the other – but everything from the intricately carved doors to the vibrant rugs is handmade by local craftsmen, from local materials. Well, most things – the likes of John Lewis might have had a hand in the binoculars and iPod speakers.

We stayed there just before Christmas and the evenings were bitterly cold, but looking up at the crystal-clear, Pollock-conjuring starry sky, soundtracked by call to prayer, our cockles were warmed, if not our bodies. The traditional djellabas (long, hooded robes) we found hanging up in our room, did the job of sorting out our rattling bones. Wearing them did, Mrs Smith noted, made us look a bit like mask-less marauders from the Scream franchise, but there was something decidedly comforting about putting on PJs, camouflaged by the djellaba on top, and wandering up to the restaurant for dinner (where you can bring your own wine, if you’ve remembered to buy any in Marrakech, that is).

The simple, candlelit dinner of soup and tagine was hearty and nourishing, and that, plus a fun chat with our table neighbours, who’d just returned from a mammoth trek, meant Mrs Smith went to bed feeling well-prepped for a trek of our own the following day, while I was still reeling from the revelation that tonight marked her inaugural public PJ episode. She’s never even done a pajama’d Sunday morning milk and papers dash.

When we set off at 8am, North Faced-up to the nines, the mountains felt like ours – there wasn’t another soul about. After a few minutes of 40-a-day-style breathing difficulties as we adjusted to the altitude, the trek was a breeze, and we reached the summit way ahead of schedule. Abdool, our lovely guide, was so impressed, that, after a long walk along the plateau, and a picnic lunch, he proposed a challenging descent down a tricky section that only an animal as dumb as a goat would be arsed with. We were a bit dubious, but Abdool knew the buttons to push, and told us he only suggests this route to strong and healthy people. Hook, line and sinker…

It was comedy difficult, but fortunately the constantly changing views did something to ease the pain, and when we finally arrived back at sundown, we congratulated ourselves for our Bear Grylls-standard outdoor skills. Less than an hour later we were in bed, almost crying with exhaustion, and didn’t wake for 10 hours. Suck on that, Grylls.

Over a lovely breakfast of fruit, Moroccan bread, jams and juice in bed, I read a booklet about the Kasbah, and slowly our warm, fuzzy love for the place – the sort you don’t expect to feel after a day – came into focus. The place is built on very sound principles, and is proving to be a genuinely life-changing collaboration between some great-sounding Brits and the local community. The owners give a portion of profits to local causes, and in its short life, the Kasbah has helped fund schools to educate local girls, a refuse collection service, and a local ambulance service which has dramatically reduced the number of women dying in childbirth.

That the Kasbah is more than simply a business is obvious when you talk to anybody working there, without anyone having to say it. People appear to feel a great sense of ownership and pride, and their love of the place struck us. Actually, no, it did more than that, it completely whumpfed us.

 

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Price per night from $200.15