Video | High times: Morocco’s growing number of cannabis tourists

Mountainous Rif region is the North African country’s main cannabis production area, and despite the drug being illegal, increasing crowds of European tourists are going on cannabis tours in Ketama and Chefchaouen

A German tourist stands in a marijuana field near Ketama in Morocco's northern Rif region. Photo: AFP

Published: 5:18pm, 10 Dec 2017Updated: 5:17pm, 10 Dec 2017

It may not feature in Morocco’s official tourism brochures but cannabis attracts thousands of visitors a year to the North African country.

At a hotel bar in the northern region of Ketama, German tourist Beatrix makes no attempt to hide the joint she is rolling.

The 57-year-old says she fell in love with the area for “the quality of its hashish and the friendliness of its residents”.

Hassan, a forty-something wearing a conspicuous gold watch, says cannabis is their main source of wealth .“The climate here is very special. Nothing grows here except kif,” he says, using a Moroccan name for the drug.

A masked farmer walks in a field of marijuana near Ketama in Morocco’s northern Rif region. Photo: AFP

Northern Morocco is a key production centre for hashish for export to Europe, but it has also seen traffic in the other direction – an influx of European visitors heading to sample the local pleasures.

While Moroccan law bans the sale and consumption of the drug, that has not stopped farmers growing vast plantations of it, providing a living for some 90,000 households, according to official figures for 2013, the most recent available.