Erfoud Date Farm Visit - the Tafilalet Palm Groves at Harvest

Erfoud is the gateway to the Tafilalet, the vast palm oasis of southeastern Morocco that has been one of the country's great date-growing regions for a millennium. Dates are the currency and the staple of oasis life here, and the town celebrates them each October with a famous date festival at the end of the harvest. A visit to the palm groves is a window into a crop and a way of life shaped by the desert.

In the palmeraie you walk beneath the date palms and see how the oasis works - the shade farming beneath the palms, the ancient khettara irrigation channels that bring water from the mountains, and the labour of the October harvest when the ripe bunches are cut high in the trees. You learn about the many date varieties grown here, from everyday types to the celebrated Mejhoul (Medjool), the large, rich date that the Tafilalet gave the world.

Tasting is the heart of it: you sample a range of dates side by side, learning to tell the varieties apart by texture and sweetness, and see how dates are stored, pressed and used - eaten with milk or walnuts, cooked into tagines, or pounded into pastes and sweets. The nearby town of Rissani, with its great desert souk and the ruins of ancient Sijilmassa, is the historic date-trading heart of the region. It is a rich, authentic taste of Saharan oasis food culture.