River · Morocco
Draa
Draa is the longest river of Morocco, a country in north-west Africa. It leaves the High Atlas mountains, bends around the desert and points towards the coast. North of Tan-Tan it can reach the Atlantic Ocean.
Picture credit: Jon Lean (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Kristian Lahdensuo (CC BY 3.0) · Paul IJpelaar (CC BY 3.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where is the Draa?
The river starts here: High Atlas mountains, Morocco.
It ends in the Atlantic Ocean north of Tan-Tan.
Countries on the river: Morocco.
The story behind it
The Draa is a river of two faces. In its upper valley it feeds one of the greenest ribbons in Morocco: a narrow band of date palms, more than a hundred kilometres long, with mud-brick villages and old fortress houses called kasbahs standing between the trees. Farmers lead the water into small channels so that barley, almonds and vegetables grow in the middle of stony ground. Then the valley turns south-west and the river enters the desert, where the sun and the sand take almost everything back. For most of the year the lower bed is a wide track of dry gravel where camels walk; only after strong rain in the mountains does a brown flood race down it and reach the ocean. That is why people disagree about how long the Draa really is.
Questions children ask
How long is the Draa?
The Draa is given as about 1 100 kilometres long. That makes it the longest river in Morocco. Since the lower bed often carries no water at all, the figure is an estimate rather than an exact measurement.
Which country does the Draa flow through?
The Draa flows through Morocco in north-west Africa. It starts in the High Atlas, runs south-east to the oasis town of Zagora and then turns towards the Atlantic. Its whole journey stays on the edge of the Sahara.
Where does the Draa end?
The mouth of the Draa lies on the Atlantic coast north of the town of Tan-Tan. Water actually arrives there only in very wet years. In dry years the river soaks away in the sand long before the sea.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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