Two things get confused here and are worth separating, because one is a genuinely remarkable natural phenomenon and the other is a business with a problem.
01 The tree is real and it is unusual
The argan, Argania spinosa, grows only in south-western Morocco. UNESCO declared the argan forest a biosphere reserve on 8 December 1998, Morocco's first, covering some 2.5 million hectares. The woodland proper covers around 830,000 hectares with about 21 million trees, and is the country's second forest resource after the holm oak.
It is a low tree with a heavily branched crown and near-horizontal limbs, drought-adapted and thorny. It bears a fruit like a large olive whose kernel yields argan oil. And yes: goats do climb it on their own to eat that fruit, because at the height of its branches there is food and on the ground, in summer, there is almost none.
02 What happens at the roadside is something else
From the early 2000s, some herders began putting goats up in trees to earn tips from passing tourists. The business grew with the traffic between Marrakesh and the coast.
The method is documented: animals are brought in from other areas, placed in the chosen tree and, so that they do not come down, tied to the branches. They stay there for hours, until the cars stop arriving. They have no access to food, water or shade, and in summer, at this region's temperatures, that means heat stress and dehydration.
Animal welfare organisations have criticised it openly. The head of animal welfare at one of them described it as “an exploitative set-up, designed to snare unsuspecting tourists to pay to take pictures”. In Morocco, the national union of tourist guides has worked against these stops and the authorities have moved to end the staged roadside scenes.
03 How to tell one from the other
You do not need to be an expert. A group of goats that climbed by itself is spread unevenly, moves in and out of the tree, and is usually well away from the tarmac, because livestock do not graze the verge. A set-up is in the tree most visible from the road, with the goats arranged at stepped heights that photograph well, a man waiting beside it and a clear place to pull in directly in front.
And there is one signal that never fails: if somebody comes to collect before you have got out of the car, the scene was prepared.
04 What to do instead
The alternative is not to avoid the argan, which is the most interesting thing on that stretch of road, but to change where the money goes. In 2014 UNESCO inscribed the practices and know-how concerning the argan tree on its list of intangible cultural heritage — knowledge transmitted and sustained above all by rural women, who extract the oil by traditional methods.
Buying the oil at a cooperative in the area — there are many along the axis between Chichaoua and Essaouira — costs the same or less than the tip for the photograph and sustains precisely what makes the landscape singular. And the tree can be looked at as long as you like from anywhere on the road, for nothing.
- Do not stop and do not payThe set-up exists only while it pays. If the car does not stop, the scene stops making economic sense.the point
- Tell the tree from the showArgan trees line the whole stretch of road and cost nothing to look at. What is charged for is not the tree: it is having the goats on it when you arrive.free
- To buy oil, go to a cooperativeArgan know-how has been recognised by UNESCO since 2014 and is sustained above all by rural women. There the money reaches the people doing the work.since 2014
- Say it to the agencyMany Marrakesh-to-Essaouira excursions include the stop by default. You can ask to skip it, and it is worth asking when you book.when booking
Behind this lies a mechanism that repeats in many destinations: a real phenomenon — goats that climb — becomes an image, the image creates demand, and the demand ends up manufacturing a permanent, forced version of something that in nature was occasional. Knowing it does not require giving anything up: it only changes where you stop the car.
