La Pause

La Pause is not a Marrakech hotel, it is a pisé camp planted about thirty kilometres from the city, in the Agafay desert. No dunes here but a plateau of bare hills, dry and mineral, starting where the last olive groves south-west of Marrakech end. You reach it by road then by track. Reckon three-quarters of an hour to an hour, and it is better to book the lodge’s transfer than to try to find the way after dark. Opened in 2003, the estate lines up eight raw-earth lodges and a few canvas tents, scattered around two pools and an olive garden, with no visible fence on the horizon. Light shifts through the day, hard at noon, long and golden at sundown, when the hills turn from beige to pink.

The stance holds in one line: there is no electricity. Not in the rooms, not at the restaurant, nowhere on the estate, and no Wi-Fi either. At night, everything runs on candles, lanterns and fireplace fires in the lodges that have them. Rooms play raw earth, reed ceilings and large beds under mosquito nets, with a shower, sometimes outdoors. Some open onto the garden, others onto the plateau’s stone. You stay full board: meals, tagines, couscous, bread baked on site, are taken outdoors on the terraces or seated on cushions under the tent, sometimes with a gnaoua group. The rest of the time runs by one of the two pools set facing the reliefs, in the hammam, in a hammock strung between two palms, or in activity: camel at walking pace across the hills, rustic golf laid out between the tracks, quad, bike, hikes towards the first Atlas foothills, all arranged on site with the team. Many travellers come for one night only, for a dinner and a sunrise over Agafay. It is this full unplug that places La Pause among the addresses where you sleep otherwise, off the expected paths.

That leaves what you accept to swap for the silence. Comfort is deliberately rustic: no air conditioning, and no electricity means no easy charging, patchy mobile signal, evenings truly dark once the candles go out. Plan for it: external battery charged, torch, layers for the evening. In summer, the Agafay plateau bakes, and the pool cool does not always cut it. In winter, nights are frankly cold under canvas, and the wood stove is what saves the day in the lodges that have one. The remove, which makes the whole charm, comes at a cost too: you do not slip out to dinner elsewhere, you do not run into the medina between activities, each trip to town is planned and paid extra. Travellers praise the welcome and the setting (9.1 on Booking, on a solid review count), value for money being the most measured score. From around £340 a night full board depending on the season, La Pause aims at couples and travellers after calm and starry nights, ready to leave their comfort habits at the desert’s edge - not for those wanting a handy base to visit Marrakech.