As the name Paradise Valley suggests, this “swimming destination” nestled between towering golden otter sandstone cliffs in the Moroccan High Atlas mountains is said to have once been a heavenly place. Popularized as a tourist destination in the 1960s by marauding hippies who made it their own, the site is approximately an hour’s drive from the southern coastal city of Agadir. A few hundred European and Moroccan visitors come here every day, many for the first time. But most leave disappointed—and perplexed.
Morocco’s years-long drought and a series of record-breaking heat waves reaching 122.7 degrees Fahrenheit (50.4 degrees Celsius) left the valley’s azure natural pools increasingly murky and shallow more often than not. Once a “breathtaking oasis,” according to TripAdvisor, Paradise Valley is, on most days, an arid wasteland. On two recent afternoons, only excitable young Moroccan boys dove into the stagnant, turbid water. Meanwhile, piles of burned trash sat unsubtly behind some of the trails. The vibe felt somewhat grave, even while a cluster of cafes offered sizzling chicken and beef tagines.
Business owners along the hiking route from the parking lot to the pools tried to put on a straight face, but they’re sardonically aware that visitors are typically left bemused by the gulf between photos of pristine basins on tour advertisements and the muddy reality. “We miss rain here, brother,” said Hassan, who runs a fresh juice stand, on a scorching hot late May afternoon. “There, and there, and there, [were] swimming pools, we miss water,” he added, gesticulating.
“No holy God is coming here. It’s a problem.” Hassan chuckled, regretfully, lamenting that there was again little rain this year. “People are still coming, but there is no water.”
“So this is… Paradise?” Kirti, a British tourist, asked her Moroccan guide quizzically. She cast her eye around to take in a band of dogs, cacti dotting the mountainside, and an eye-catching Palestinian flag painted on a rock. The guide shrugged. “He didn’t have any answers,” she told me. “He just wanted to end the conversation.”
“The photos are very old,” she said of the pictures on display at tour operators in nearby Agadir and Taghazout, which lure unsuspecting holiday makers for doomed day trips. Kirti is not the only tourist searching for somewhere relatively clean to swim. “I feel a little bit misled,” said Aaron, another British tourist. “The photos show a beautiful swimming pool, but it’s obviously seen better days.”
Some Google reviews are more scathing. “There is no waterfall or anywhere to swim, just a large brown puddle to dip your feet into,” one recent visitor complained. The cleanliness and depth of the pools always ebbed and flowed, and some recent guests who visited after the limited amount of rainfall enjoyed their trips. But another reviewer said: “Complete and utter waste of time, nothing to see, a couple of ponds and some rock faces. All the tourists [are] wondering which bit is the paradise! Don’t bother wasting your holiday time on this.”
For Moroccans, however, such consequences of the drought are the least of their worries. For the first time in 29 years, King Mohammed VI urged his compatriots not to slaughter lambs this Eid, as is customary, after the drought caused herds to dwindle and prices to rise steeply amid weather-related inflation. The country’s second-largest reservoir contains just 3% the average amount of water as a decade ago, and public bath houses called hammams—staples of Moroccan culture—in 2024 were forced to close three days a week to conserve water. These significant shifts go well beyond seasonal fluctuations.
“In Morocco, climate change has contributed to a nearly decade-long drought and staggering heat waves that studies found were made 100 times more likely due to climate change,” said Francesco Femia, co-founder of the Center for Climate and Security and co-founder and research director at the think tank Council on Strategic Risks. Indeed, the World Bank warned of this in 2018. “The problem is not just water stress, something that the country has a lot of experience with,” Femia said. “It’s unprecedented water stress and unprecedented heat, and for unprecedented stretches of time.”
Morocco’s Paradise Valley is certainly not the only beloved natural beauty across the world to lose its luster due to climate change. The question is: How long will it take for vacationers to get the memo and stop coming?
Glacier National Park in Montana had more than 150 glaciers when it opened over a century ago, but today just 37 named glaciers remain. “While the shrinkage in Montana is more severe than some other places in the United States, it is in line with trends that have been happening on a global scale,” said Dr. Andrew Fountain, a geologist at Portland State University. Glaciers in the European Alps are also retreating at an alarming rate, with climbing routes becoming impassable during summer from melting permafrost.
In Australia, marine heatwaves and pollution at the Great Barrier Reef—the world’s largest coral reef—bleached long stretches and left many areas ghostly and lifeless. Some fear it could all be gone within a generation. In the Middle East, the Dead Sea is shrinking rapidly, and some of its banks are collapsing due to hotter temperatures and water diversion. Africa’s Lake Chad has contracted some 90% since the 1960s due to climate change, irrigation, and population growth.
Worsening climate pressures are causing serious issues for Joshua Tree National Park in California, which has been hit by droughts, heat waves, and wildfires that in 2020 burned more than 1 million trees. Conservation ecologist Dr. Cameron Barrows, from the University of California, Riverside, acknowledged there were prehistoric climate shifts, but global heating today is far more rapid and independent of those geological trends.
“Scientists and park staff have been tracking desert tortoises and Joshua trees in the Park for decades,” he said. “What they have found does not bode well for these species, as the conditions they are facing are both warmer and drier than those species have ever faced. Tortoises are now rare, where[as] they were abundant in the 1970s when the first surveys were conducted.”
Joshua trees—those distinctive, tall desert yuccas—still occupy their historical range within the park, he added, but they no longer reproduce at lower elevations that are warmer and drier. “Park visitors may not notice the difference, but the Joshua tree seedlings can no longer survive the dry conditions that are increasingly the norm.”
Back in Paradise Valley, there is hope that things can only get better, and that the heavier rain seen elsewhere in the country earlier this year could make it here in 2026. “It’s been seven years of drought [here] but this year it started changing,” said Hafid, a waiter at a restaurant which serves Berber omelets and amlou, a distinctive blend of almond butter and honey. “We had one week of rain. Now you can see some green in the trees, and there is some water in the valley.” However, he acknowledged: “Before the water was clear, now it’s brown.”
The beautiful, potentially redemptive reality is that sustained rainfall could transform the valley’s fortunes. “We need so much rain to clean the pools,” Hafid added, “and then the water will be blue and green like in the pictures.”
For now, however, many travelers leave vowing not to return, while guides and vendors worry about livelihoods tied to the valley’s lost allure. Without meaningful rainfall, Paradise Valley risks becoming a cautionary tale of a changing climate, its name remembered only with irony—and regret.
Biome
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