Erfoud

Where it sits. Erfoud stands in the Tafilalt, the great oasis of southeastern Morocco, on the Ziz river where it spreads into palm groves before losing itself in the desert. The town is about 80 kilometres southeast of Errachidia, roughly 55 kilometres north of the dunes of Erg Chebbi at Merzouga, and a short drive from Rissani, which occupies the ground of the medieval caravan city of Sijilmasa. Erfoud itself is a planned grid of red-ochre buildings laid out around a central square, low, hot and dusty, with the palm groves along the river on one side and open hamada, black gravel plain, on the other.

A garrison that became a market town. Unlike Rissani, Erfoud has no deep past. It was founded as a French military post during the pacification of the southeast in the second decade of the twentieth century, on ground chosen for control rather than for water rights, and it grew into the administrative and commercial centre for a region whose historic capital lay a few kilometres south. The regularity of the plan and the uniform ochre render date from that origin. The town is the practical hub for the Tafilalt: a bank, a bus station, hotels, mechanics and the fuel stop before the dunes.

Fossils as an industry. The plateau around Erfoud is built of Devonian marine limestone crowded with the shells of orthoceras, goniatites and trilobites, laid down when this desert was seabed. Since the middle of the twentieth century that geology has supported a real local industry. Blocks are quarried from the hamada, sawn, ground and polished into slabs in workshops on the edge of town, and the resulting black "fossil marble", with pale conical shells sectioned across the surface, is turned into table tops, basins, fountains and tiles that are exported worldwide. Several workshops welcome visitors and show the process from raw block to finished plate. As always with fossil markets, quality and honesty vary: some trilobites offered in the souks are composites, reconstructions or outright carvings.

Dates, and the festival. The Tafilalt is one of Morocco's principal date-producing regions, with hundreds of thousands of palms along the Ziz and Rheris. The harvest runs in autumn, and Erfoud holds an annual date festival, generally in October, with markets, music and displays. The groves themselves are worked as they have been for centuries, in shaded multi-storey gardens where cereals and vegetables grow beneath the palms and water is distributed through khettara channels and open ditches.

On screen. The desert around Erfoud has served a long list of productions needing empty hamada, dunes and space to build. The Mummy shot here in the late 1990s, Sahara and Prince of Persia used the surrounding country in the 2000s, and in 2015 the James Bond film Spectre built the villain's desert compound out on the flat near the town. That set produced the sequence for which the location is best known: a controlled explosion recorded by Guinness World Records as the largest film stunt explosion ever staged, using thousands of litres of kerosene together with conventional explosives. It should be said plainly that nothing of it remains. The set was destroyed by design, the site was cleared afterwards, and visitors who go looking for it find bare gravel plain. What survives is the landscape that made the shoot possible: absolutely flat ground, clean horizons and reliably cloudless skies.

Out toward the dunes. Most travellers use Erfoud as the last town before Erg Chebbi, the sand sea whose crests reach around 150 metres above the surrounding plain near Merzouga. The road south passes Rissani, whose souk operates on set days and whose surrounding country holds the ruins of Sijilmasa, once the northern terminus of the trans-Saharan gold trade, and the village of Khamlia, known for Gnawa music brought north from the Sahel. Camel treks and four-wheel-drive runs into the dunes are organised from every hotel; overnight camps sit in the hollows between crests.

Getting there and timing. Buses and grands taxis connect Erfoud with Errachidia, Rissani and Merzouga, and long-distance services run to Fes and Marrakesh. October to April is the sensible season: midwinter days are bright and mild with cold nights, and summer regularly passes 45 °C. Spring brings the sand-laden wind that can reduce visibility to a few hundred metres and shut down desert excursions for a day or two at a time. Anyone heading into the erg should confirm that their driver carries water, and should treat the dunes as genuine desert rather than as an extension of the hotel car park.