Tamegroute Green Pottery

Tamegroute is a small village of earth buildings in the lower Draa valley, and its potters work in a style found nowhere else in Morocco: a thick, uneven glaze in olive and emerald green, made from local clay and a mix that includes manganese and barley flour, fired in wood kilns dug into the ground. The results are heavy, slightly warped and no two the same, which is the appeal. The pottery quarter is a cluster of open workshops, drying yards and kilns you walk straight into, with wheels turned by foot and unglazed pieces stacked in the sun. In the same village the zawiya holds a library of manuscripts, some very old, on theology, mathematics, medicine and astronomy, displayed in cases in a small reading room with an attendant to explain them.

What you actually see

• The green glaze - the manganese glaze that gives the pottery its colour and unevenness.
• The sunken kilns - wood-fired pits dug into the ground behind the workshops.
• The drying yards - unglazed tagines, bowls and lamps stacked in the sun.
• The zawiya library - old manuscripts on science and theology in a small reading room.

When to go

Autumn to spring, since the Draa valley is extremely hot in summer and the workshops are open to the sky. Mornings are when the wheels and kilns are working. The village is on the road towards Mhamid, so it fits into a desert trip rather than being a destination in itself.

Honest expectations

The workshops are dusty, cramped and not arranged for visitors, and there is an expectation that you will buy; the pieces are heavy and awkward to carry home and the glaze chips. Library opening depends on the attendant being present and photography is not allowed inside. Tamegroute itself is small and there is little else to do once you have seen both.

Nearby

Zagora is twenty minutes north; the dunes at Tinfou and the road to Mhamid run south.