Unauthorized Camping by Tourists Sparks Outrage in Moroccan City

These tourists are abandoning the tourist campsites made available to them and are setting up in non-equipped areas and on private properties, causing damage to agricultural land and the ecosystem, and reducing to nothing the efforts of the authorities to provide the city with quality tourist infrastructure. "What is happening is that a number of tourists do not go to the three tourist campsites made available to them and prefer to camp outdoors and on private land, which poses many environmental and economic problems," denounces an associative actor to Hespress.

Beyond the "serious damage to agricultural land" that this phenomenon can cause, "the direct contact of these tourists with the inhabitants, outside of an appropriate framework or infrastructure, can generate certain problems of a criminal nature, such as the harassment of children or other similar incidents, problems of this type having already occurred," observes the activist, specifying that "the persistence of this phenomenon involves environmental risks on the one hand, and can lead to economic losses both for the municipality and for the investors who have devoted their funds to tourist campsites."

The same actor has also invited the municipality of Tafraout to "develop new spaces respecting the conditions of safety, hygiene and the environment, in order to limit the phenomenon of wild camping and to guarantee the respect of private properties by the tourists using caravans who flock to the region." For his part, an associative leader stressed that the large number of tourists with caravans who flock to the city every year "exceeds the capacity of the three existing tourist campsites in the region."

According to him, this massive influx could explain this phenomenon, which he did not fail to condemn. The local authorities are trying to solve this problem. "We have submitted a request for temporary occupation of a 5-hectare forest land to build a modern campsite to accommodate the large number of tourists visiting the region," he said, adding that with regard to the environmental aspect, "the municipality, in collaboration with an economic partner, has set up a station in the center of the city of Tafraout, connected to the sewerage network, allowing tourists to safely dispose of their waste and access drinking water."