Moroccan Officials Deny Plans for New Marrakech Airport

No new airport will be built in Marrakech. While some media, including Bladi.net, have mentioned a project to build a new airport in Marrakech, writing that it was Farid Chourak, wali of the Marrakech-Safi region, who made this announcement on Tuesday, February 20, during the ordinary general assembly of the Regional Tourism Council (CRT), a source at the National Airports Office (ONDA) provided a formal denial, reports Le360. "The wali only asked the question, wondering about the opportunity to have a low-cost airport in the city and to reserve the existing airport for regular flights," specifies, on condition of anonymity, a person who attended the said CRT Marrakech-Safi meeting. For the time being, only the extension of Marrakech-Ménara airport, for which the call for tenders for the architectural studies has recently been awarded to the architect Abdou Lahlou, is a concern. It is planned to set up a passenger terminal of an area of around 120,000 m² including the extension. The cost of the project amounts to 850 million dirhams.

In 2014, Aziz Rabbah, then Minister of Equipment and Transport, had mentioned the project to build a new airport in Marrakech, the Marrakech-Ménara airport not being able to absorb the growing flow of visitors to the ochre city, which should reach more than 14 million passengers by 2030. During the consultation meetings with local stakeholders, the former wali of the Marrakech-Tensift-Al Haouz region, Abdeslam Bikrate, had shared the results of a technical study to identify the location of the future airport site. At the time, two sites had been identified respectively located in the communes of Sidi Zouine and Sidi Bou Othmane. With an initial estimated cost of 4.3 billion dirhams, the infrastructure was to have a 3,500-meter long and 60-meter wide runway, a passenger terminal with an annual capacity of 10 million passengers and various ancillary structures.