Ifrane: Morocco’s Alpine Anomaly

You descend from the cedar forests.

The Barbary apes are behind you now—those endangered macaques you fed fruits to while they eyed your belongings with calculation honed over millennia. The road winds through the Atlas foothills. Then, Ifrane appears like a hallucination. Or a mistake on the map.

Red-tiled roofs. Alpine chalets. Manicured lawns. Street signs in French pointing to roundabouts where a stone lion sits—sculpted by a German prisoner during World War II, guardian of the strangest town in Morocco. This isn’t Morocco. This is Switzerland. Or the French Alps. Or some fever dream of European planners who decided the Atlas Mountains needed a ski resort in 1929 and simply built one without consulting geography or cultural context.

You stop for lunch. Maybe coffee. The cafés serve croissants without irony. Al Akhawayn University students—Morocco’s elite studying in English at one of North Africa’s most prestigious institutions—fill sidewalk tables with laptops and lattes. Not a djellaba in sight. Not a donkey. Not a souk. The cognitive dissonance completes itself.

In winter, snow blankets these streets. Moroccans come to ski. To build snowmen. To pretend they’re in Europe without leaving the kingdom. In summer, it’s a mountain retreat where families from Fez and Meknes escape the heat. Either way, it’s Morocco’s cleanest city. Spotless. Almost aggressively tidy. As if trying to prove something to its North African neighbors about what’s possible with enough determination and disregard for context.

You don’t stay long. This isn’t a destination. It’s a brief stop on the drive to Fez. A chance to stretch legs. Use remarkably clean restrooms. Marvel at the absurdity of Alpine architecture in Africa. Grab an espresso that’s actually good.

The irony doesn’t escape you—in a country of ancient medinas and imperial capitals, you’re stopping for coffee in mock Switzerland. But after days of navigating souks and dodging touts, the sheer ordinariness of Ifrane feels almost exotic. The familiar rendered strange by being exactly where it shouldn’t be.

You finish your coffee. Return to the vehicle. Fez awaits—real Morocco, complicated Morocco, medieval Morocco.

Ifrane recedes in the rearview mirror. Still European. Still impossible. Still there.