Auberge des Gorges de Dades

The terrace is the point of the place: tables set under open sky, facing straight down onto the Wadi Dadès and the cliffs that pen it in. Auberge La Belle Vue Dades is a small inn in the Dadès gorge, a stretch of southern Morocco where the river has cut a corridor through red rock. Rooms run simple: single, double, and triple options, plus dormitory beds for those travelling light or in a group. Meals are taken on that terrace, looking over the wadi rather than into it, and the restaurant is really the hotel's second room. Staff arrange excursions into the gorge and the wider valley, along with walking and cycling routes that leave straight from the door. The landscape does the talking here. Sandstone walls rise on both sides of the water, and the light through them shifts from pale ochre at midday to a deeper rust by evening. The rooms are plain but the setting is not, and that trade is the whole appeal of staying here rather than further along the road.