In his poem “The Rolling English Road,” the 20th-century English writer G. K. Chesterton spoke of “a reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire.” I have no idea which road Chesterton meant, nor did I even know who Chesterton was until I googled him while writing this article. But he might as well have been describing the road to Figuig, a vibrant but arid town in the eastern reaches of Morocco.

The bus carrying me and my travel companion, Yassmine Bouattane, lurched back and forth as the highway from Oujda to Figuig alternated between asphalt and dirt, a plume of dust trailing our one-vehicle convoy.

I looked at Yassmine to see how she was coping. She had fallen asleep, apparently far less captivated by reeling, rambling roads than Chesterton and I were.

My journey with Yassmine had begun in Rabat, but my fascination with Figuig started much earlier. It was the first week of September 2021, and, as was to be expected during a Moroccan summer, I was quite sweaty. I had arrived for my first day of classes at the Qalam wa Lawh Center for Arabic Studies in Rabat.

“How are you?” I asked my new teacher in Darija, the Moroccan dialect of Arabic.

“I’m ‘above Figuig,’ as they say,” he replied.

If you haven’t heard this expression before, that’s because it sounds ridiculous in English. But my teacher claimed that the Darija term—best rendered as “fouq Figuig” in the Latin script—had been all the rage among an older generation of Moroccans.

“Figuig used to be the coolest town in Morocco,” my teacher explained. “If you were ‘above Figuig,’ you were basically on top of the world.”

“When exactly was Figuig the coolest town in Morocco?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “Maybe the ’70s.”

I wasn’t even sure if my teacher had been alive in the 1970s, but who was I to question the wisdom of a man I had met five minutes earlier?

And so it happened that, whenever a Moroccan friend asked me how I was in Darija, I would answer, “I’m above Figuig.” However, many Moroccans my age didn’t recognize this term, and a number of them thought that I was speaking gibberish. I couldn’t really blame them, of course, as my Darija accent was and remains awful.

It was only at the tail end of 2021, when I met Yassmine’s sister Loubna through a mutual, vegan friend, that my ceaseless, almost-religious repetition of being “above Figuig” was rewarded.

“My family’s from Figuig!” Loubna told me.

“You should take me there,” I joked.

Morocco’s coolest town

But this summer, I was presented with the chance to turn my awkward, dated Darija catchphrase into reality: Loubna invited me to join her family on their annual trip to Figuig. Finally, I would get to see what had been and might still be the coolest town in Morocco.

I’d be lying if I said that many of my Moroccan friends weren’t a bit puzzled by my enthusiasm for a town largely known nowadays for being extremely far from everything else. By car, Figuig is nine hours from Rabat and five from Oujda, the closest city.

Wikipedia’s assessment of Figuig also didn’t inspire confidence: “Modernization has somewhat raised the standard of living, and drawn much of the town’s population away, so that it is now struggling to reach stability.”

Unfortunately, we’ll never know what the godlike editors of Wikipedia meant by “stability,” because they didn’t cite their source.

Loubna and Yassmine assured me that, Wikipedia’s unfounded hostility to Figuig notwithstanding, I would love my time there. Embarking on a journey to a Moroccan town that Americans rarely visit also aligned with the spirit of cultural diplomacy behind the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, which had brought me to Morocco in the first place.

But I was most intrigued by the possibility of turning my Figuig experience into an article for Morocco World News, then becoming a celebrity among English-speaking Moroccans and parlaying my newfound fame into a lucrative career as an Instagram influencer.

“I’m in,” I told Loubna.

On August 3, Loubna informed me that I would be departing with Yassmine from Mega Mall, Rabat’s third-nicest mall (Rabat has three malls); Loubna headed off in her cousins’ car.

Except for a short stop at Yassmine’s home in Salé, I spent the next five hours in a car with her, her mom, her uncle, and her grandmother, who seemed deeply concerned that I would get sunburned from sitting next to the car window. I thought she was being excessively grandmotherly, until I indeed got sunburned from sitting next to the car window.

A short history of Figuig

I was excited to ask Yassmine for the unabridged history of Figuig during our road trip. But my hopes were short lived: Yassmine fell asleep within minutes of us entering the car. So I just consulted my next-closest friend, the Internet.

The website of the World Monuments Fund informed me that the town of Figuig, situated at the edge of the Atlas Mountains, developed around a remote oasis brimming with date palms. By the 11th century, the oasis’ residents had organized into seven distinct communities and built fortified neighborhoods called “qsour.” Figuig also grew into a critical way station, hosting Moroccan pilgrims heading to Mecca as well as merchants traveling between Tangier and Timbuktu.

In the decades after Morocco’s independence, Figuig—surrounded on three sides by Algeria—served as a key trading post between the kingdom and its largest neighbor. But the town began a steep decline in 1994, when the borders between the two countries closed.

A number of Figuig’s residents, known collectively as “Faguig” in the local variant of Darija, chose to leave the town in the immediate aftermath of the border closure. The trend lasted well into the 21st century: Morocco’s 2004 census counted Figuig’s population at 12,516, a number that dropped to 10,872 at the time of the most recent census, conducted in 2014.

Nonetheless, the 2014 census noted the presence of 11 foreigners in Figuig, suggesting that the town continued to appeal to international travelers. I was excited to test this theory.

But that would have to wait, because Yassmine, her family, and I decided to stay the night in Oujda before proceeding to Figuig. We roamed Oujda’s traditional markets and ate karan, a northern Moroccan dish served to me as a baguette filled with hummus; it was the best thing I had ever tasted, other than French tacos (to which I have dedicated another article). All the while, Oujda’s tallest building, a villainous tower emblazoned with the logo of Banque Populaire, loomed in the background.

The following morning, Yassmine and I hopped onto a bus to Figuig, while her mother, uncle, and grandmother remained in Oujda. For the next hour, I asked Yassmine whether we had reached Figuig whenever we passed a town with more than four buildings.

Yassmine spent the remainder of the bus ride asleep, only awoken when I accidently smacked her with my two-liter water bottle. A pair of older men next to us gossiped in a Tamazight dialect unique to Figuig, where Morocco’s Amazigh indigenous people and their overlapping but highly variable languages predominate.

Since Figuig’s population was a third of my dinky American hometown’s, I was surprised by the size of the town that the bus rolled through. Spacious houses with high walls bled into one another, separated only by the occasional corner store and the ubiquitous fast food joints that Moroccans have dubbed “snacks.”

Figuig’s neighborhoods, in turn, were bordered by groves of date palms and squat hills that branched off from the Atlas Mountains. The town was broadly divided between “Upper Figuig” and “Lower Figuig,” where Yassmine’s extended family, the Bouattanes, had gathered.

In Lower Figuig, I got to meet the bulk of Yassmine’s cousins, aunts, and uncles. I was also reunited with Loubna and her cousin Mounia Bouattane, whom I had once interviewed for an article about Moroccan medical students.

A cohort of Bouattane cousins walked me to the homy inn where I would be staying, Maison de Nanna, which Loubna, Yassmine, and their relatives would somewhat ominously call “the auberge” for the rest of the trip (I later learned that auberge is just a French (and English) word for hotel).

The Bouattanes led me to believe that my arrival in Figuig would be “the talk of the town,” because of how few foreigners came to the city.

“Everyone’s going to be gossiping about you,” Yassmine had said during one of the few moments of our bus ride that she was awake.

The friendliest place in Morocco? 

Admittedly, at least one person mistook me for Yassmine’s husband—this is much funnier when you realize that she’s 10 centimeters taller than I am—but, otherwise, no one in Figuig seemed to take undue interest in me.

This isn’t to say that people in Figuig weren’t friendly. In fact, I’d go so far as to call it the friendliest place in Morocco that I’ve visited. People always said, “Hello,” to one another in the street whether they knew each other or not, and I was met with smiles and a stream of pleasantries whenever I greeted passersby in Darija. More times than I could count, kindly strangers also helped me find my way to the main streets from “the auberge,” which was nestled behind a labyrinth of poorly lit alleys.

The neighborliness that characterized Figuig manifested in a variety of ways. Water coolers with cups sitting atop them stood in front of homes throughout the town, available for thirsty pedestrians to use as they pleased.

“If you wanted to, you could even walk into someone’s home and ask for a meal,” Yassmine told me. “That person would be happy to host you.”

I had no intention of putting this claim to the test, even if it would make for a great Morocco World News article.

While this kind of hospitality is a tradition throughout Morocco, Figuig had its particularities as well. The most obvious of these was the ubiquity of bicycles, which I’d found to be a rarity in Rabat and every other city in Morocco that I’ve seen.

In Figuig, by contrast, everyone rode bicycles, from kindergarteners to the 80-year-old man who almost ran me over on multiple occasions. No one seemed to know when or how bikes came to Figuig, but I could see their utility: Figuig, though remarkably spread out for a town of its population, had limited parking space and only three intra-city taxis.

These factors made bikes a necessity, and explained why bike shops speckled every corner of Figuig. If anything, I was surprised that other isolated Moroccan towns hadn’t adopted bicycles to this extent.

But the aspect of Figuig that was hardest to miss was the heat. The daytime temperatures topped 40 degrees Celsius during the entirety of my stay. Thanks to my beleaguered Italian ancestors, I was blessed with the genetic gift of getting profusely sweaty at even just above 20 degrees.

“How are you not sweaty all the time in Figuig?” I asked Mounia, Loubna and Yassmine’s cousin.

“We’re constantly sweating,” she replied.

I appreciated her honesty.

In view of the heat, we spent the sunlight hours touring pools scattered around Figuig. Many of these pools were just sections of irrigation canals that had been widened, taking advantage of the water flowing from and into the Figuig oasis.

As we swam at the “Azrou” pool, partially obscured by a dusty grove of date palms, we were joined by Loubna and Yassmine’s Oujda-based cousin, Houda Himmou. She filled us in on all the Figuig gossip, which, sadly, did not include anything about me.

Our group also made a brief trip to a compound at the outskirts of Figuig to try out the more modern, heavily chlorinated “Boukhoud” pool. It was so named for a nearby landmark, the Boukhoud Cemetery, which did not have a pool. Houda made sure that I was clear on this distinction.

The undimming charm of Figuig

It was during the Boukhoud outing that I met yet another of Loubna and Yassmine’s cousins, Mounia’s sister Nawar. I knew that Nawar and I would be friends as soon as she revealed that she was binge-watching Bob’s Burgers, but she proved to be an indispensable resource for a different reason: she could explain how Figuig weddings worked.

Two of my four nights in Figuig were spent at the wedding of one of Houda, Loubna, Mounia, Nawar, and Yassmine’s more distant cousins. Though I couldn’t constantly pester the five of them with questions in person during this event, as the wedding party was segregated by gender, Nawar was kind enough to tell me what was going on, and what distinguishes Figuig weddings from those in the rest of Morocco.

According to Nawar—blame her if what I’m about to say is wrong—Figuig weddings usually last three days, and can go up to seven, whereas the average Moroccan wedding has been consolidated to a one- or two-day affair. The cuisine also differs a bit: those lucky enough to receive an invitation to a Figuig wedding, or bold enough to crash one as I did, will get to try trid, a thin but tasty sheet of dough folded around a mix of meats and sauces.

What struck me most about the wedding, however, was how few of the attendees were actually from Figuig. While I suspect that most of the guests had an ancestral connection to the town, all the people I met at the wedding had come from elsewhere in Morocco or beyond. Even the bride usually lived in Casablanca, the groom in France.

Every August, Moroccan families with ties to Figuig descend on the city, reconnecting with relatives they might not have seen for months or years. Loubna and Yassmine had come from Salé, Mounia and Nawar from Mohammadia; some of their relatives had traveled all the way from Canada. Most Figuig weddings also happen in August, since everyone who’s anyone will be in town anyway.

It seemed that, even if many of Figuig’s inhabitants had left for greener pastures after 1994, their descendants always found their way back to a town that never lost its charm.

“How would you rate your experience in Figuig?” Yassmine asked me the day before our departure.

“I’d give it 10/10,” I told her.

“And what was your favorite part?” Yassmine replied.

“Eating karan,” I answered.

“That was in Oujda,” Yassmine corrected me.

“In that case I only give Figuig 9/10,” I said.

I left Figuig on August 8. Having been back in Rabat for over a month, I have to admit that I miss the town even more than I thought I would, despite its apparent lack of karan.

At least I can now say that I’m “above Figuig” with a little more authority. Of course, only people who have been to the former coolest town in Morocco will be in on the joke.