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 (MAD1,980.00), via openexchangerates.org, using today’s exchange rate.
Deftly rigged for kitesurfers, all-inclusive stay, La Tour d’Eole, is as Earth-kind as it is breeze-blessed – an eco lodge at the edge of the Sahara, lapped by the sheltered waters of Dakhla Bay, and windy for 300 days a year. This coastal resort of bungalows, rooms, suites, and villas, has a private beach and watersports academy, where you can hire kit and take tuition. It does a fine line in after-sail care, too, with a cosseting spa to ease board-weary muscles, and a beach club and restaurant taking turns to serve cold cocktails and hyperlocal, organic cuisine.
Smith Extra
Get this when you book through us:
Handcrafted glass bottle of La Tour d’Eole shower gel
11am, but flexible, subject to availability. Earliest check-in, 3pm.
Prices
Double rooms from £156.23 (MAD1,980). Please note the hotel charges an additional local city tax of MAD13.00 per person per night on check-out.
More details
Rates include all meals, but exclude drinks. There are varying requirements for minimum stays, depending on the time of year.
Also
This remote desert stay is sadly not suitable for wheelchair users or guests with limited mobility.
Please note
Private transfers arranged through the hotel are the easiest way to navigate the 45-minute drive from/to the airport. A return trip for up to four guests costs MAD1,100.
At the hotel
Watersports centre; kit lockers; changing area and showers; a beach club; concierge, and free WiFi throughout. In rooms: protective glazing, electric sunscreens, free bottled water, bathrobes, and organic custom bath products. Prestige Suites and villas also have a 50-inch TV, Nespresso machine, tea-making kit, and a minibar.
Our favourite rooms
We’re enchanted by the Prestige Suites, arranged over two floors with generous outdoor space. Bungalows are our pick for Smiths à deux, especially if you bag a front-line one with uninterrupted ocean views. Villas are notably well appointed for group stays, set around a private pool and sun terrace with ensuite bedrooms, enticing living spaces, and a kitchenette. Pool- or sea-view rooms are your budget-friendly options.
Poolside
A heated infinity pool set on a sun terrace in front of the restaurant is open all year round: dip in its sulphurous, geothermal waters and take in the lagoon views.
Spa
The spa at La Tour d’Eole is a welcome retreat after a day out on the water: book in for a deep-tissue Berber massage with argan oil in one of its three treatment rooms; join a free group yoga session, late afternoon (private lessons can be booked at extra cost); or head to the Zellige-tiled hammam for a steam, followed by an aromatic scrub.
Packing tips
Strictly trousers and shorts – a skater dress if you will – but leave any flared skirts and dresses, shawls and wraps at home (it’s too windy). And taking along a film camera or sketchbook is a good shout in such cinematic scenery.
Also
La Tour d’Eole’s location on El Argoub beach enjoys 300 days of wind each year – great if you’re kitesurfing, but a little exfoliating if you’re just planning to stay on shore.
The emphasis on watersports here and the desert-edged, remote setting mean La Tour d’Eole is better suited to adults, but children of all ages are welcome. Babysitting can be arranged, and the hotel has multi-bedroom villas, each with a private pool.
Best for
Teens. If you’re not kitesurfing, there’s limited entertainment around…
Recommended rooms
Classic Bungalows take an extra bed, but it’s the three- and four-bedroom villas that hold most appeal for families, especially as they have private pools.
Crèche
For under-11s, nannying services are available by day, and the hotel can help arrange this (from around €30 for four hours).
Activities
Kitesurfing is the flagship activity here – open to over-11s (so long as they weight 40 kilograms or more). For six- to 11-year-olds, there’s a windsurfing academy.
Swimming pool
All pools, private and communal, are filled with sulphurous, geothermal water and have step entry, and your water babies will need adult supervision.
Meals
Villas come with kitchen facilities, but it’s unlikely you’ll want to stray far from chef’s cooking.
Babysitting
The hotel can help arrange babysitting with a trained nanny; price on enquiry.
Sustainability efforts
Despite the desert setting, La Tour d’Eole’s eco credentials are rock solid. The resort was built using sustainable materials including local stone and timber and responsible construction. The resort runs on solar power and is investing in green-energy vehicles. Its footprint is also reduced through energy-efficient kitchen equipment, LED lighting and sensors, heated-by-nature pools, and ecological air-conditioning. The latter means not using traditional air-con at all, but relying on a system of aeration in rooms, combined with protective glazing and electric sunscreens to help keep the mercury in check. Recycling policies here are rigorous: this plastic-free stay provides bath amenities in cardboard or glass packaging; there’s an intelligent wastewater-treatment system; digital operations mean a much smaller paper trail, and kitchen staff practise zero-waste cuisine, showcasing vegetarian and vegan plates. Ingredients such as fish and meat are sourced directly from local producers, and farms in the area supply organic vegetables, fruit and herbs.
Make the most of the varied scenery on offer by alternating tables on the patio or on the terrace at La Table d’Eole.
Dress Code
Easygoing: anything but beachwear passes muster for dinner.
Hotel restaurant
Flanked by an ocean-facing terrace on one side, and a plant-dotted patio on the other, La Table d’Eole is light-filled space for dining indoors or out. Breakfast is served here – a buffet affair with Continental options, and Moroccan-inspired plates and eggs cooked to order bolster its daily variety. By evening, chef Ali Timouni and his team turn their attention to dinner and the healthy, fresh (entirely organic) cuisine that defines the hotel’s flagship dining spot. Timouni’s menu, which aspires to zero waste, focuses on hyperlocal ingredients: an oyster farm, two kilometres away, supplies couldn’t-be-fresher shellfish, and lobster is caught in the lagoon, as is the fish. Fruit and veg come straight from nearby growers to the hotel kitchen. Style wise, you can expect a delicious melting pot of Moroccan and French influences, plus nods to Asian cuisine. Down on the beach, Le Chergui is the resort’s lunch spot – serving grills, and mer and terre light bites. From 3pm, its curation of crêpes, sweet or savoury, draws a fresh afternoon-tea crowd.
Hotel bar
Next to the Ocean Academy, Bar Le Chergui is your drinking den on the sand, serving sodas, cold beers and signature cocktails (hard or soft) alongside its food menu. Adjacent to the restaurant, Bar La Tour d’Eole is a pergola-shaded lounge of outdoor sofas, where there are eight different mojitos to work your way through, as well as wine, champagne, and a selection of gins, whiskeys and rums.
Last orders
La Table d’Eole is open for breakfast, 8am until 10.30am; for dinner, it’s 7.30pm until 10pm. Le Chergui is open 12.30pm until 3pm for lunch, then until 7pm for crêpes.
Room service
Between 8am and 10pm, you can order from the restaurants’ menus to your room.
Where the desert meets the Atlantic in mainland Western Sahara, you’ll find La Tour d’Eole, the only address on El Argoub beach, which edges the lagoon, looking across to the Dakhla peninsula.
Planes
Dakhla has its own airport, served by connections via Morocco (often Casablanca), and direct flights from Paris. It’s 45 minutes by road from the hotel and private transfers, which are recommended, can be arranged from MAD1,100 for the return trip.
Automobiles
There’s little call to use a car during your stay at this coastal desert hotel, but if you are bringing your own wheels, the hotel has free parking.
Worth getting out of bed for
The hotel’s watersports centre, Ocean Academy, is the first of its kind in this area, set proudly on El Argoub Beach, and attracting kitesurfers and windsurfers of all levels of ability to its wind-blessed waters. For extra adrenaline thrills, this is the place to try out wing-foil, too. You can book in at Ocean Academy for tuition, and Duotone kit is available to hire. If you bring your own gear, you can rent a locker, and use the centre’s changing rooms and showers. The main freeride area is just in front of the hotel’s private beach; but at high tide, experienced riders are drawn to the ‘piscine’, a shallow expanse of very flat water where the ocean bed is comfortingly always in reach. For wind-free days or to vary the schedule, La Tour d’Eole can happily arrange a number of tours. Head out on the hotel’s boat either to go fishing, or to visit the unspoilt sands of the White Dune and Dragon Island, where you can climb to the summit for bird’s-eye bay views. Discover the unique wetlands of Sebkhet Imlili, and the beautiful-if-desolate shores around Porto Rico, on the Dakhla peninsula, which is across the lagoon from the hotel (an hour away by road). As part of any tour, you can call at the Sahraoui Village, where you will take part in a traditional tea ceremony – a small insight into the life of the area’s Saharan nomads.
Local restaurants
You’re in the desert and your stay is all-inclusive (you only pay for drinks), making La Tour d’Eole realistically the only dining spot you need.
Every hotel featured is visited personally by members of our team, given the Smith seal of approval, and then anonymously reviewed. As soon as our reviewers have returned from this remote coastal stay in Western Sahara and unpacked their rigs and rashies, a full account of their breeze-kissed break will be with you. In the meantime, to whet your wanderlust, here's a quick peek inside La Tour d’Eole in Dakhla…
Dakhla, a sandy peninsula lapped by the Atlantic Ocean in Western Sahara, has a first-class reputation as a kitesurfing and windsurfing hotspot. A sheltered bay lies between Dakhla and the mainland, providing optimum conditions in which to perfect your freeride. It’s a reputation that eco lodge La Tour d’Eole has been built upon: at the edge of the Sahara, this boutique escape enjoys a cinematic setting, sheltered by rocky outcrops, with its own private beach on the lagoon that’s home to a beach club and watersports academy. The hotel has also been built upon strong planet-friendly foundations, from its responsible construction to its plastic- and aircon-free principles. Polished, nature-inspired accommodation runs the gamut from terraced ocean-view bungalows for two, to four-bedroom villas with private pools. Organic, French-Moroccan fare at the restaurant makes the most of a hyperlocal supply chain, with oysters farmed down the coast, and fish fresh from the bay. And we’d encourage you to make the most of the cocktail list, with its eight-way celebration of mojitos, and an accomplished optics run of spirits. The spa, too, is not to be overlooked – its massages and free yoga classes are all the restorative tonic you need after a day on the waves.
