In Morocco, Outdoor Adventure Has a Colonial Backstory
- Pierre-Gaël Pasquiou
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
Climbing and trekking have put some Moroccan valleys on the global adventure map. But what happens when mountains where people actually live become the backdrop for athletes coming in from somewhere else? Through his work on what he calls Morocco’s “sporting mountain,” anthropologist Thomas Fouquet examines the blind spots of an outdoor culture that often sees itself as neutral, even as it moves through a much longer history.
People think they are coming for the rock. For sun while Europe shivers. For big red walls, high valleys, villages at the base of the routes, and the promise of an adventure that still feels available—less built-out, less crowded, less processed than the Alps. Taghia, Todgha, Chefchaouen, Imlil: for many climbers and trekkers, those names already sound obvious.
But a cliff is never just a cliff.
In an article published in the Revue internationale des études du développement, titled “La montagne-sportive au Maroc : entre confiscation, préservation et marchandisation,” Thomas Fouquet, an anthropologist and research fellow at France’s CNRS, asks us to look at what outdoor culture often prefers to leave outside the frame: colonial history, social inequality, tourist narratives, money flows, gear flows, and the power dynamics hidden behind the call of wide-open spaces.
Imported Mountains
The paradox is simple. Morocco’s mountains are there. Visible, inhabited, massive. And yet the sports now practiced in them have long been shaped by models imported from elsewhere.
The story begins under the French protectorate. France established its protectorate over Morocco in 1912. Ten years later, the Club Alpin Français opened its High Atlas section. In 1923, the club held its annual congress in Marrakech, with Marshal Lyautey as honorary president. Moroccan mountain sport was born, then, into a strange rope team: European actors bolting routes, building the first refuges, training guides, and projecting onto the Atlas an Alpine imagination imported from Europe. The wall was Moroccan, but for a long time the story wrapped around it spoke French: alpinism, exploration, soft conquest, and the vertical postcard.
In an interview with Vertige Media, Fouquet sums up that history plainly: “In the eyes of Moroccans, mountain sports are a kind of foreign space at home.” The mountains are national by geography, but partly foreign in their codes, institutions, stories, and uses. Here, the word “postcolonial” is not a slogan. It describes what is visible on the ground. “Mountain sports were introduced and developed in Morocco through colonization,” the researcher says.
That legacy still leaves marks. Many routes are still equipped by Europeans, either living in Morocco or passing through. Some clubs remain shaped by codes inherited from that history, while Moroccan practitioners often come from privileged urban backgrounds.
Things are shifting, though. Fouquet now sees a real surge of interest in climbing among young Moroccan city-dwellers. In Rabat and Casablanca, climbing sections are full. Some have even had to turn people away. It would be tempting to call that democratization. Fouquet is more cautious: “There is mass participation, but there is no democratization of climbing.”
The profile remains fairly narrow: young people from urban middle- and upper-class backgrounds, often with international experience, studies abroad, or time spent in Europe. Many discover climbing elsewhere before realizing it exists at home. As if the detour through another country suddenly made their own visible.
“The Moroccan population is not targeted by the outdoor market. But Moroccan territories are targeted by outdoor practices”
Thomas Fouquet, anthropologist and research fellow at the CNRS
In his article, Fouquet quotes a 33-year-old Moroccan climber who began climbing during secondary school at a French lycée in Casablanca. For him, climbing first meant plastic holds on a concrete wall, inside a French school setting. Then came the discovery of local rock. His reaction: “Oh yeah, we Moroccans can climb too, we actually have this here [laughs].”
Sometimes it takes a social or geographic detour to realize your country is not just a destination for other people.
The divide is material, too. In Morocco, the climbing market remains tiny. “Today, there is no equivalent of a Vieux Campeur,” Fouquet says, referring to the French outdoor retail chain. Climbing shoes, chalk, tape, resoling: everything quickly becomes a matter of suitcases and shared workarounds. “I share my chalk and tape all the time,” the researcher says. Then he adds: “The Moroccan population is not targeted by the outdoor market. But Moroccan territories are targeted by outdoor practices.”
Fake Authenticity
Moroccan valleys attract visitors because they seem to offer what many Europeans believe they have lost at home: mountains that feel rawer, less developed, less crowded, less transformed.
But authenticity often has a trapdoor.
What a traveler sees as charm—remoteness, the absence of heavy infrastructure, the feeling of being outside time—can be lived locally as a very concrete constraint: inadequate roads, limited access to health care, school, work, or electricity. In his article, Fouquet quotes geographer David Goeury: “Isolation, a constraint at the national scale, could then be considered a resource at the global scale.” In plain terms, what holds a place back can become its best selling point.
Fouquet describes a deep disconnect, where “the aspirations and desires of some are strongly disconnected from those of others.” The trekker wants an untouched village, without too many power lines in the picture. The person who lives there just wants light.
A line from work on the Aït Bouguemez valley, quoted in the article, captures the bind: “For tourists to come, heritage must remain, but for inhabitants to remain, heritage must evolve.”
In Imlil, the last village before Toubkal—Morocco’s highest peak, at 13,671 feet—this misunderstanding takes shape. Fouquet calls it an “outdoor bazaar”: guides, lodging, secondhand gear, old ice axes, beat-up skis, the commerce of adventure and the economy of making do. A Chamonix of the Atlas, but without the polished finish of an Alpine resort. “It is a kind of hypertrophy of consumerist and capitalist logic taking hold of the mountains in Morocco, but in successive layers,” he says.
Climbing adds an even more sensitive layer. Hiking passes through. Climbing changes things. It drills into the rock, installs bolts—the fixed metal protection climbers clip into—establishes routes, names them, maps the walls. It does not simply move through a landscape. It leaves its own signs behind.
Fouquet is not trying to turn foreign route developers into easy villains. Many, he notes, are deeply attached to Morocco, know the places well, and build sincere relationships with local residents. Still, the act carries weight. “Appropriating that portion of territory and naming it has something symbolically significant about it, given the country’s history and the foreign presence within it,” he says.
“You come, you practice, you consume, you leave”
Thomas Fouquet, anthropologist and research fellow at the CNRS
The question quickly becomes concrete: Who decides that a cliff becomes a climbing area? Who bolts it, names it, maintains it? And who remains a spectator when a place where people live gets reclassified as a “spot”?
In recent months, young Moroccan climbers from the CAF in Casablanca have spoken out against what they see as the persistence of a colonial mindset in certain practices. What they are criticizing is less the existence of climbing itself than the way places are consumed. Fouquet sums up that logic sharply: “You come, you practice, you consume, you leave.”
Against that, another way of inhabiting the sport is beginning to take shape—one more attentive to places and to the people who live there. The anthropologist calls it “politics from below”: paying attention to how you arrive in a village, to the name you give a route, to what the activity leaves behind, not only to what it lets you tick off in your send log—a climber’s personal list of completed routes.
The Kaizen Effect
Layered onto that long history is the accelerator of social media. YouTube, Instagram, and stories of personal transformation are making the mountains more visible to young urban Moroccans. That can be a valuable new entry point. But sometimes it opens first onto the image, before it opens onto the culture of the place.
Fouquet tells the story of a mountain guide who came across young people from Marrakech trying to climb Toubkal in winter, wearing jeans and sneakers, after seeing videos online. “Young Moroccans are interested in the mountains. But there is this huge gap between the images being produced and the concrete knowledge people actually have,” he says.
The summit becomes a story backdrop before it is understood as an environment. People come looking for an image of themselves before they have learned the cold, altitude, snow, slowness, and risk.
But the story does not end with dispossession by image. In Taghia, young local residents have become excellent climbers. Fouquet describes them as “a kind of bridge between this inhabited mountain and this sporting mountain.” Maybe that is where part of the future lies: in the ability of Moroccan practitioners to produce their own stories, their own images, their own ways of living with the cliffs.
Morocco is not some exotic exception. That is part of what makes the research useful: it looks at a specific case that speaks to a question running through all of contemporary outdoor culture. “This is not about saying there is something highly specific to Morocco. These are Moroccan forms of a very global question,” Fouquet says.
How do you move through a natural space without consuming it like a disposable product? And how do you think about wild places without forgetting that they are already inhabited, named, worked, and contested?
Fouquet is not calling for a boycott of the Atlas. He rejects the comfortable posture of the judge. “My question is not to criticize the fact that foreigners come climb in Morocco, but rather how they do it, with what ethics, what mindset.”
Maybe it all comes down to one sentence, offered at the end of our conversation: “It is more a problem of pace than distance.”
The modern trap is not going far. It is arriving too fast. Seeing the cliff before the village, the line before the place, the wild adventure before the history.
Thomas Fouquet’s study reminds us of something outdoor culture sometimes prefers to forget: wide-open spaces are never empty. Even in silence, cliffs are always saying something.
