Morocco Overland ~ Map Reviews
UPDATED October 2010
UPDATED July, 2009
Note that reviews below only relate to the Moroccan Atlas and Sahara (the ‘Morocco Overland zone’). The north of Morocco is not considered although one can safely assume that a map or guidebook’s general characteristics will not vary much north of the Atlas.
For the full story on maps for the whole Sahara, including 1 million IGNs, 500k TPCs as well as Soviet-era maps (all several years old and so not recommended for Morocco) click this. An interesting discussion here on scaning and importing a Morocco paper map into Memory Map software) and a topic I asked about on the HUBB about using Tom Toms Sat Navs in Morocco gave some good answers.
Short version:
Get a Michelin 742 map in a car, or a grided and waterproof Rough Guide map for a bike. Import Olaf into the GPS, some calibrated French 250s in the laptop, and have a scan of Google Earth before you go. Plus, with an updated map your Sat Nav may be more useful in the cities than you might expect.
Med ferries map here; Morocco port access maps here.
Roamers are one-degree-wide grids to 
download and print off on clear acetate to help estimate your position on 1m-scale long/lat grided map like the Rough Guide and RKH (or reduced by 80% to work with 1:800k GeoCentre/IGN). Accurate for use between 29-31°N only and calibrated west of the meridian, roamers are less error prone and fiddly than a ruler and pencil.
Country maps
There are up to a dozen Morocco country maps in print and taking into account scale, price, clarity, date of publication, presence of a long/lat grid and so on, the following maps made my shortlist for on and off-highway travel in the south of Morocco (the region most people tour in). I used them all on the two main research trips in 2008 and so became familiar with their strengths and weaknesses.
One thing quickly became clear: while you won’t get lost and die of thirst relying these maps, scrutinise them closely and they’re all surprising inaccurate (and tend to copy each other’s mistakes). Some minor routes shown as sealed are in fact little-used pistes that are not likely to be sealed anytime soon, and some pistes depicted identically on several maps simply do not match the orientation shown, or don't exist at all. Unlike the guidebooks, it seems highly unlikely that between editions the map publishers even send out fact checkers to update the information. They probably just rely on complaints from users.
In other words for navigating along the main 'N' highways in an RV they’re mostly fine, but using even this short-listed selection for reliable navigation and accurate position-finding on southern Moroccan back roads or tracks is likely to be a hit and miss affair.
Once you’ve accepted this limitation these maps aren’t so bad. Without other navigational aids just be ready to not always be sure exactly where you are or where your piste will end up. It's all part of the fun and anyway, by Saharan standards Moroccan tracks are short so this is not much of a problem, even on motorcycles with a 15-litre+ tank.
What also became evident over the weeks was how many more interesting and easily-navigable pistes there are in Morocco which never make it on these maps. The same can be said for villages; many established settlements on a par with other locally-depicted places are missing while some towns are given excessive prominence for what you'll find there. This inconsistency with road and place 'hierarchy' is probably as old a complaint as mapping itself.
Michelin 742 1:1m (2008)
Michelin, the best map for Morocco, right? It’s OK but the thin paper Michelin uses does not lend itself to regular use, not helped by the fact that at over 1.5m wide, the 742 is a big map. What's also missing is a Long/Lat grid. Why? Here’s a possible explanation*.
Rather than city insets you get five useful sub regions at 600k scale (notably Jebel Sirwa south of Marrakech), and even some useful climate stats. What I like most about this map is the intuitive 1:1m scale (a millimeter = a kilometre), the clear, functional Michelin design and the fact that it goes right down to Laayoune which means you can view all this book’s routes on one sheet (apart from the lower halves of Routes MO2 and MW6). At under a fiver rrp in the UK it’s also the cheapest of the Morocco maps.
With the exception of a suspiciously straight piste heading west out of Taouz, roads and pistes wind around with believable intricacy (unlike the lazier RKH). We get Michelin’s well-known scenic ‘green road’ feature (imitated on the GeoCentre and IGN country maps, below) which is pretty reliable, but in places they go too far: if you’re a woodpecker the forest cover is not to be relied on too closely unless for example the Taliouine region has experienced a recent epidemic of Dutch Elm disease (depictions of dunes are the same and it’s this sort of detail that you feel never gets updated).
As for the accuracy of secondary roads and pistes – a common failing on all these maps - look carefully at the Key (in five languages including Arabic – nice touch). Unconventionally, uncoloured (white) roads with solid borders on both sides signify ‘Road surfaced’ (route revêtue or ‘covered’, as opposed to goudronée; tarred) but one dashed edge means an all-out piste. Surfaced with what you may wonder? It’s a conveniently ambiguous way of saying they could be surfaced with asphalt, gravel, egg mayonnaise or rocks. Some of these solid-edged ‘white roads’ are major double-width highways where the regular yellow colouring would be more appropriate. As on other maps a few pistes and even white roads don’t exist while many more are missing. In places this data is up to eight years out of date but overall they don't get it as badly - or as conspicuously - wrong as the RKH, below.
Instead of banging out so-called ‘new editions’ which often add up to no more than a new cover design, Michelin should take a bold step forward and printed double-sided on plastic paper with grid lines; you could forgive the out of date detail because of the good design. That is never going to happen so in my experience the 742 is not significantly better for back-country or piste driving than a more robust and grided RKH or IGN/Geo Centre.
* Try and draw on a grid and it soon becomes clear the map is tilted quite a few degrees east of north, probably because it’s extracted from the top left of their ‘North and West Africa’ 953 map which is north-centred on E16°. Without presumably expensive correction putting a grid over a 742 would expose this lean all the more clearly and might put customers off. Don’t know what I’m on about? Don’t worry it’s not that important.
Reise Know-How 1:1m (2007 - also downloadable)
In the end, recognising all the maps were flawed in some small way, the German RKH was the one I used most for the second research trip. Why? Because unlike paper maps, especially the Michelin, it won’t fall apart after less than an hour’s accumulated use, the accuracy and clarity are good enough once you know the flaws and the 
double-sided printing made it compact and easy to use in a crowded lift, shove in a bike's tank net (right) or open out in a gale. Try any of that with a Mich or a TPC! I also find the intuitive 1m scale good for quick distance estimates and the grid lines work well for estimating a position on the map or with an acetate roamer (see the top). They even squeeze an index round the edges.
Cartographically the RKH wasn’t the best design for me but if necessary you can eat your lunch off it, use it as an umbrella, origami it into a pet bath and generally treat it rough without it ending up like Michelin confetti. Unless they've the environmental notoriety of UPVC windows, plastic paper maps are the way to go.
The biggest drawback with the RKH was the vague alignment of roads and tracks, trying to be clever but guessing wrong which pistes might have been sealed and even marking tracks and roads where none ever existed! For regular tourists, heading in a rental car towards what is marked as a sealed road on the map and turns out to be a piste is more irritating than it merely being out of date (ie: a track that's since become a road). It may be why Mich play it down by using their less conspicuous ‘white roads’. It would be great to see the numerous errors corrected in the next edition but it's no more likely to happen than with any other map listed here (see the near-identical Rough Guide version, below).
On the RKH website a '4th, 2008' edition is listed but with the same cover and an identical ISBN. New editions always attract a new ISBN so it's either an online trick to suggest the map is a bit newer than it is, or more likely this map is the same as the new Rough Guide below, but oddly they've not bothered with a new cover or ISBN, contravening the Protocols of Frankfurt.
Whatever the date, this map also available as a pre-calibrated digital download direct from RKH (PC apps only), but costs €15.
Rough Guide 1:1m (2009 - no longer in print)
This long overdue 2009 edition has caught up with the near-identical RKH on which it's based and which, despite a few flaws common to all these maps, are among the better country maps for Morocco. As expected, the south features virtually no corrections over the 2007 RKH's errors in depicting some 4WD tracks as roads or showing nonexistent tracks - in fact it even introduces a couple of new ones.
In other words its qualities and drawbacks match those of the RKH reviewed above, including one-million scale, compact, double sided printing, a useful grid which will work with a roamer (see the topof the page) and best of all, robust plastic 'paper'.
The RKH version prints the relief with more contrast or ink, or is just a shade darker which is better for clarity - but in the UK that's not worth the effort in tracking one down.
GeoCentre 1:800k (2006?)
After the Michelin I liked the design of the German GeoCentre map; an off-white background on comfortingly thick paper and with muted relief shading made the roads and tracks all the clearer. And it has a long/lat grid at no less than half-degree intervals which with a ruler or the right-sized roamer makes plotting your position on the map from a GPS waypoint easy.
Downside is the back road information was pretty sparse and out-of-date compared to other maps I used. Whenever I cross-checked something against other sources it had nothing more to offer, usually less. Geo copy Michelin's green bands to identify scenic drives; it’s an objective thing but what ‘green roads’ I drove on the Geo were indeed scenic but so were a lot of other plainly marked byways. Insets include three northern cities and the Western Sahara – the south edge of the main map ends quite far north at Sidi Ifni (The Michelin 742, above, goes well below Smara). You get an index booklet (does anyone ever use these?), a key in several languages and like the F&B they don’t give a publication date. The identical IGN version (below) claims to be from 2006.
IGN 1:800k (2006)
This French map is actually identical to the Geo Centre described above but with a slighter darker tone (just as the RKH is darker compared to the Rough Guide version). The paper is a tad thinner too and you don’t get the index booklet or the multi-lingual key but you still get the grid.
In short it’s a compact GeoCentre with the main sheet reaching down only to Sidi Ifni. The remainder is an inset at 2.5m – not so good for using it for the ‘MW’ region routes. You may as well get the thicker paper of the GeoCentre or something else.
Freytag & Berndt 1:900k (2005?)
The F&B does not print a publication date on this map apart from a misleading ‘06/2008’ next to the ISBN). Amazon lists it as a 2005. The F&B was the map I referred to last and after a while didn't bother at all and eventually threw it away. While there's a possibly useful index on the back and insets of five northern cities as well as Western Sahara, for some reason the main body of the map has a dull yellow background making the detail less legible. Add to that road information that is not especially up to date and a mushy style used to show the relief. Worst of all, pistes are depicted with a vague, dashed line and even change midway into a dotted line (‘footpath’ according to the key - on a 1m-scale country map!) which did not inspire confidence.
Other maps
IGN 1m (1960-70s; CD and paper)
The Institut Geographique National is France's equivalent of Britain's Ordnance Survey; they churn out modern country and leisure maps (as above) but started out producing great topographic mapping during the colonial era for the French territories.
These grided maps are still easily available on paper and on CD and for the central and western Sahara are the best for exploring off the highways, partly because even though some sheets are over 50-years old, nothing has changed much since the last Ice Age. In Morocco much has changed and continues to do so, so the three sheets which cover the south (‘Rabat’ NI-29; Marrakech’ NH-29; ‘Bechar’ NH-30) are of limited use. Instead get one of the similar-scaled country maps recommended above.
TPC 1:500k (1980s - paper)
People like these maps as they look the part and ‘Tactical Pilotage Chart’ sounds cool but while in the central Sahara the scale is handy and they compliment the IGN 1 mils, for fast-changing Morocco they're way out of date, too big and have all the ingrained limitations of surface detail found in pilot’s maps: great on relief, confusing on roads and tracks. Fuller details here (scroll down to 'US Defense Mapping Agency').
My advice: despite the useful incremental grid, go for the 250s below if you want to see the grains.
Soviet Topo - 1:1m, 1:500k, 1:200k (1980s - download)
The USSR's equivalent Cold War project to the Defense Mapping Agency's efforts above. Click the link to search and download topographic maps for anywhere in the world, including Morocco up to a scale of 100,000. All the script will be in Cyrillic of course and I must say I find the orange colouring and general design of these maps not so easy to read (more here - scroll down to 'Soviet...'), but they're free and ready for calibration.
French 1:250k (1960/80? - CD, paper)
Like the IGNs above, these colonial-era maps are so old they don’t show a border between Morocco and Algeria, but a ‘250’ will almost always identify some obscure mountain piste that you’ll find yourself on (even if it’s just a thin black line) and will depict the topography with clarity and colour. Along with many disused pistes that time forgot, most of today’s ‘N’ highways are there, showing how little has changed in the south and proving that most pistes were well established in the French era, even if many have got sealed in the last decade.
Each sheet covers one degree north to south and one-and-a-half degrees left to right, but being old-fashioned, they lack a TPC's handy incremental grid. They are apparently available on paper in Morocco from some ministry or other, but it may take some persuading to get a set; it’s not like buying them from a shop.
However, the whole series of 62 full-colour sheets are available on dvd (along with a whole lot of other maps) from these guys for €70 (scroll to the bottom for email contacts), or as paper copies from Darrs in Munich at €15 a sheet. Pre-calibrated with GPS software (for PCs only) the dvd versions become a useful navigational aid in Morocco, even if it means carrying a laptop and GPS around. With a set of calibrated 250s and a GPS you can confidently wander around the outback of Morocco and never get too lost.
Preferring paper maps, I reduced the size/scale of the dvd files slightly to fit onto standard A0 paper size (841 x 1189mm - scale now ~ 1:350,000) and got a selection of 24 sheets covering all the book's routes (pictured above or click this) printed up at a local copy centre for around £8 each, ie: a bit less than Darrs.
Marokko Topo GPS - 'Olaf map' (download into GPS)
‘Olaf’ is my abbreviation for the free downloadable Marokko Topo GPS vector map produced by a German guy called Olaf Kähler – don’t ask me how he does it. If you could import maps like the French 250k above into a GPS there would not be so much of a need for Olaf but you can’t (at least not into a £200 Garmin).
Olaf improves greatly on the base map of Morocco you'll get in a standard GPS handset (not hard) but crucially is further enhanced by adding tracks to this base map which have been sent in as track logs by contributors to the project.
Initially my appreciation of ‘Olaf’ was rather limited as I don’t use a PC. With a PC I believe you can zoom around the entire Marokko Topo map on a computer. I’ve only experienced Olaf on the matchbox-sized screen of my GPS and usually I had no idea whether a route I was about to try was Olafed until it crept onto my GPS screen. When it did I knew I wasn’t going to get too lost because you know a fellow traveller has actually come this way in the last few years and track logged it precisely with a GPS; it’s not some guessed-at trace of a cartographer in another country. With an Olaf track you can zoom right in and usually follow a path accurately through a village instead of blundering around and frightening the mules. Sometimes though the track is out by several metres which is odd and other tracks finish up as dead ends - but that is all down to the quality and range of tracklogs sent in by contributors. Either way, stick Olaf in your GPS unit and you have an excellent and peer-proven map of many pistes in Morocco and pretty good highway info too.
By the way, when I say ‘GPS’ I mean something like a Garmin 76 unit, not an in-car satellite navigator such as a Tom Tom which won’t have useful maps for Morocco, though who knows, might import Olaf? A Tom Tom's bigger screen would certainly be welcome.
Google Maps (Internet required)
Used as a pre-planning road map, Google Maps can be misleading on southern Morocco compared to the more detailed paper maps reviewed above. Click between ‘map’ to ‘satellite’ and you’ll often see how inaccurate the highway overlay is compared to the true satellite image (same as Google Earth but less flexible) although the Terrain button can be illuminating. Pistes and roads are as out-of-date, incomplete, not labeled with the standard Moroccan N- or R- road/track designations, inaccurate in hierarchy (closed piste and two lane blacktop shown as the same - the same flaw as TPCs) or are non-existent, just like the worst paper maps above. Furthermore, many town and village names are unrecognisable, presumably taken from non-standard US sources. Zoomed in, you can look at the Google map on Morocco a long time before you find a name you recognise and work out where you are.
Google Earth (Internet required*)
Google Maps may be lame but Google Earth (a programme to download for free) is particularly effective in vividly dramatizing and navigating the arid topography of a place like southern Morocco, even if resolution/clarity on some of the segments is a barely legible mush shot through the bottom of a Coke bottle at F1.8. Other sectors (they are few) are just a few months old and look as crisp as looking down from a hot air balloon. On Erg Chebbi you can even spot the tourist bivouacs in the dunes. Stripped of all the layers and the often wildly-inaccurate ‘user-added’ junk, at last you have a WYSIWYG ‘map’ that cannot lie. With Google Earth you can preview your route or cook up new links between pistes, discover new areas and generally be thrilled at the bird’s eye view of Morocco. Where the res is good it's brilliant.
* You can of course grab screen shots of interesting areas if you're taking a laptop or image viewer. And it's possible to save the web browser's cache of Google Earth, so offering GE zooming and panning functions without internet. Nice!
