SunIsle Holidays

Agadir is sean as Moroccos top beach resort. Built into a neat grid of residential suburbs and wide boulevards the town has a quiter feel to it when compared with the other magor Moroccan cities. However this is made up for by its huge sandy beaches offering safe swimming and sun 300 days a year making it ideal for that holiday spent on the beach. As well as its beaches it hosts the Souss Massa National Park and the ruined Kabah. All the features comt together making Agadir a top place to stay.

This is a land custom-built for trekking and getting off-road as you follow quiet mountain trails amid mountain villages, fields of flowers and the homeland of the hospitable Berber people. The Atlas ranges separate the Mediterranean and Atlantic coastlines from the Sahara Desert. Spectacularly rugged and sparsely vegetated, these mountains contain terraced cliffs, enormous escarpments, deep gorges and flat-topped summits. Where the rock is exposed you can see a thick sequence of sedimentary and volcanic rocks, most often Jurassic limestone, cut through by layers of granite. The oldest rocks are the 610-million-year-old granites and granodiorites of the Ourika region near Setti Fatma.

The laid-back attitude, plum accommodation, bracing sea breezes and picture-postcard ramparts make Essaouira ('esa-wera') a firm favourite on the traveller's trail. An increasingly chic place, this beautiful 18th-century port town has a gentrified but authentically scruffy medina, a chilled out arty atmosphere and a gorwing reputation as Morocco's finest resort. Artists, musicians, craftsmen and film-makers have all fallen for its charms - fortified walls, turrets and colonnades hiding a maze of narrow streets lined with white-washed houses, workshops, galleries and renovated riads. The strong coastal wind, known locally as the alizee, has made Essaouira Morocco's best-known windsurfing centre. Its true strength, however, is that tourism has not completely overcome the town. The port remaining a hive of activity and the medina is as important for locals as it is popular with holiday-makers.

The oldest of the imperial cities, Fes measures the symbolic heartbeat of the country. Founded shortly after the Arabs exploded across North Africa and Spain, Feq quickly became Morocco's religious and cultural centre. The fertile countryside allowed the city to grow quickly and nurture a reputation for culture and learning. Any Fassi will be quick to point out that the city created the world's first university, centuries before Oxford and Cambridge were a twinkle in anyone's eye. Learning came hand-in-hand with Islamic orthodoxy, and its colour - green - is endlessly repeated in Fez. The medina of Fes el-Bali (Old Fes) is the largest living Islamic medieval city in the world, and nothing quite prepares you for your first visit. Its narrow winding alleys and covered bazaars are crammed with shops, restaurants, mosques and tanneries - a riot of sights, sounds and smells.

Capital of the south and the epicentre of Moroccan tourism, Marrakech is changing fast. Once the hub of camel caravans from the south, the oasis was the finest city many traders had ever seen. It remains exotic, but a new city is growing up around it, a playground for Europeans who want the exoticism of staying in a riad in the medina, but also want to hang around the Parisian-styled cafes in Gueliz and the new 'beach-style' swimming pools. Some things do not change though - the Djemaa el-Fna and the area around it remains the beating heart of Marrakech, the greatest souq in the south, whose ebbs and flows retain something of that transitory atmosphere that lingered around the first nomad campfires.