Forest road in the mountains near Ifrane, Morocco

This is certainly not the typical scene I expected to see while on a visit to Morocco. Our tour took us up into a mountainous area near the ski resort of Ifrane. The forest area was beautiful, not unlike that in the Adelaide Hills here in South Australia, or the area around Mt Macedon north of Melbourne – or perhaps even the Katoomba area in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney.

The main reason our tour took us to this area was to see the monkeys that are resident in this forest.

We didn’t see the monkeys – but the scenery mostly made up for our disappointment.

For those who are interested, the animal in question is the Barbary macaque which is found in various habitats in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and Algeria. A small population of unknown origin can be found at Gibraltar, the only wild population of monkeys in Europe. You can read more here.