In Marrakesh-Safi the water came down from the mountain underground.
The plain gets 221 millimetres of rain a year and still has a palm grove. It was watered by khettaras, underground tunnels bringing Atlas snowmelt down by gravity: some 650 were still working at the end of the twentieth century and today almost none are.
It helps to grasp the shape of the region first, because everything else follows from it. Marrakesh-Safi runs from the Atlantic to high mountains: coast in the west — Safi, Essaouira — a dry plain in the middle, the Haouz, and the wall of the High Atlas in the south, with Toubkal, the highest point in North Africa. Eight provinces and prefectures, 4,878,500 people in 2024, and four thousand metres of relief in little more than a hundred kilometres.
01 A plain with no water of its own
The Haouz is an arid plain. Marrakesh's 221 annual millimetres fall in winter and the shoulder seasons: June brings 3.1 millimetres and July 2.2. July averages three tenths of a rain day. This is not an occasional drought: it is the normal regime.
But to the south stands a range that holds snow much of the year, and that snow feeds an aquifer at the mountain foot. The water exists, but it is there and underground, and the city is here, sixty or seventy kilometres away and several hundred metres lower. The entire agricultural history of this region is about moving that water without losing it on the way.
02 Six hundred and fifty tunnels
The solution is called a khettara, a local variant of the Persian qanat. It means digging a gallery at a minimal gradient from the point where the water table is tapped, at the foot of the mountain, to where the water is needed. Because the conduit is buried, the water does not evaporate on the way and no energy is needed to move it: it comes down on its own.
To dig it, vertical shafts are opened every few metres, used to remove spoil, keep the line true and ventilate the works. Those shafts, strung across the landscape like a row of small craters, are the only part of a khettara visible from outside.
The first were built in the Haouz in the early twelfth century, under the Almoravid ruler Ali ibn Yusuf, who governed between 1107 and 1142 — contemporary, that is, with Marrakesh's own consolidation as a capital. At the end of the twentieth century some 650 were still working on the plain and around the city, and they were what watered the palm grove and the market gardens.
03 Why they no longer work
A khettara does not pump: it takes water where the water table offers it. That makes it extremely elegant while the aquifer holds, and completely useless the moment it stops holding.
Which is what has happened. Over-extraction through motorised wells and a run of dry years have made the water table fall sharply. Once the water drops below the tapping level, the gallery is dry at its head: the system does not break, it simply stops reaching. Today the khettaras of the Haouz have all but disappeared.
The palm grove visible from the road is, to a large extent, what that system left behind. It stands because it is now watered from wells, but its shape — the extent, the spacing of the palms, the layout — was decided by a network of tunnels that no longer carries anything.
04 The other face of the same mountain
The High Atlas that supplies the water is also the one that moves. On 8 September 2023, at 23:11, a magnitude 6.8 earthquake had its epicentre in the rural commune of Ighil, Al Haouz province, some seventy kilometres south-west of Marrakesh.
At least 2,960 people died, most of them outside the city. Some 69,674 buildings were damaged, of which 22,296 were destroyed outright. It was the strongest instrumentally recorded earthquake in Morocco and the deadliest in sixty years, and it struck above all the hillside villages of the High Atlas, built in earth on very steep slopes.
05 How to read the region
With this in mind, the usual journey — Marrakesh to the southern valleys, or Marrakesh to the coast — stops being a succession of landscapes and becomes a route through a system. The mountain stores. The plain consumes. Between the two ran, for eight hundred years, a network of conduits that no longer works, and the villages closest to the source of the water are the ones that suffered worst in 2023.
And it explains something that puzzles you on arrival: why so large a city sits exactly there, in the middle of a dry plain with no useful river. It is not beside the water. It is at the point where water, brought underground from the mountain, still arrived with enough head to be worth having.
