Morocco’s obsession about high scale tourism investment

Morocco would seem well-placed to expand its sustainable tourism offer. Many of its higher-end tourism products emphasise authenticity – as with the Riad hotels which have become a feature of women’s and travel magazines over the last few years, and music festivals which also appear in the 2020 plan – and eco-tourism activities such as desert and mountain trekking, which would be enhanced by anticipated developments such as desert eco-lodges.

While many countries try to promote their tourism by simple procedures like printing different sceneries from their tourist attractions in postal stamps like Spanish smart stamps or in their currency notes, the issue has been raised of Morocco’s mass tourism areas, such as resorts like Agadir, many of which were built with World Bank funding during the 1970s, and the potential difficulty of ‘greening’ them. And, as reported on Green Prophet earlier this month, Morocco has also recently taken steps which would seem to run counter to its ecological aspirations.