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Morocco puts its administrative geography in front of a camera more readily than most countries: the number plate ends in a province code, the signs are written in two alphabets and often three, and the landscape changes character every hundred kilometres of the drive south. What makes the regions hard is that they are new. Morocco replaced sixteen regions with twelve in 2015, and a great deal of what is written about the country, including some of the map data, still draws the old ones. This page is the twelve that exist, the groups worth learning them in, and what puts you inside one.
Morocco has been divided into twelve regions since 2015. The reform that made them was not a tidying up: it cut sixteen regions to twelve, moved provinces across the new lines, and gave what was left elected regional councils with budgets of their own, in a country where the region had until then been mostly an administrative convenience drawn on top of the provinces. The first councils under the new map were elected that September.
The consequence for anybody learning them is that the old sixteen are still everywhere. Meknes-Tafilalet, Chaouia-Ouardigha, Doukkala-Abda, Tadla-Azilal, Gharb-Chrarda-Beni Hssen: all of those were regions within living memory and none of them is one now. If a map you are learning from has Grand Casablanca on it as a region the size of a city, it is a decade out of date.
Below the regions sit the provinces and prefectures, which is the tier the number plate actually encodes, and below those the communes. A region is the largest unit under the state, run by an elected council alongside a wali appointed from Rabat.
Most of the names are cities, and the exceptions are the useful part. Seven of the twelve are simply their principal cities strung together with hyphens, which makes them easy once you know where the cities are. The other five are not, and each of them is named after a piece of geography instead: the Oriental is a direction, Souss-Massa is two rivers, Draa-Tafilalet is a river valley and an oasis belt, and the two Saharan regions pair a city with a historic territory. The trap that follows is the obvious one. Agadir is the largest city in Souss-Massa and is nowhere in its name, and Ouarzazate is the same story in Draa-Tafilalet.
The traps are mostly cities and mostly the same shape: a place far better known than the region that contains it.
Famous towns in unexpected regions. Chefchaouen, the blue one, is in Tanger-Tetouan-Al Hoceima. Ifrane, the one with the alpine chalets, is in Fes-Meknes. Essaouira is in Marrakech-Safi rather than with Agadir down the coast. El Jadida is in Casablanca-Settat. Merzouga and its dunes, and Ait Benhaddou and the film studios at Ouarzazate, are all in Draa-Tafilalet.
Two regions on the Algerian border. The Oriental runs the length of the northern half of that border and Draa-Tafilalet takes the southern half, so "near Algeria" is not an answer. The split is roughly the High Atlas: north of it and you are in the Oriental, south or east of it and you are in Draa-Tafilalet.
One tree that answers on its own. Argan grows wild essentially nowhere but southwestern Morocco. A hillside of short, gnarled, olive-ish trees with goats in them is Souss-Massa or the Essaouira end of Marrakech-Safi, and almost nothing else.
Those four groups are this site's, not Morocco's. Unlike the Dutch landsdelen or the old Kenyan provinces, there is no official tier above the twelve regions to borrow, so the cut above is one made for drilling: each group is contiguous, each is a piece of the country somebody could point at, and each can be switched on and off on its own in the game's start dialog.
North is the Rif and the country behind it: the Mediterranean coast, the Oriental along the Algerian border, and the Saiss plain with Fes and Meknes on it. Atlas is the three regions the mountains run through, from the Middle Atlas down the far side of the High Atlas to the Souss valley between the High Atlas and the Anti-Atlas. Atlantic is the coastal plain, which is the smallest of the four by area and holds the capital, the largest city and much of the population. South is Guelmim-Oued Noun and the two Saharan regions below it, which between them are about two fifths of the map and carry a small fraction of its people.
Souss-Massa: Agadir, Taroudant, Tiznit and the Souss valley running inland between the High Atlas and the Anti-Atlas. It is the region most likely to be answered wrongly as "Agadir", which is not a region and never has been. The giveaway on the ground is the argan, which grows here and in almost nowhere else on earth, and the second giveaway is the valley itself: flat, irrigated and citrus-planted, with mountains on both horizons.
Tanger-Tetouan-Al Hoceima: the whole Mediterranean coast and the Rif behind it, from Tangier at the strait east to Al Hoceima. It is the smallest of the twelve by area and the one most often lost under the score panel, so zoom in before you tap. It is also the wettest and steepest part of Morocco, with a Mediterranean feel the rest of the country does not have, and it holds Chefchaouen, which people reliably place somewhere else.
Draa-Tafilalet: the only region of the twelve with no sea at all, running along the southern side of the High Atlas from Ouarzazate east through Tinghir and Errachidia to the dunes at Merzouga. Everything about it is arid and linear: oases strung along the Draa and the Ziz, kasbahs in rammed earth, and a landscape of dark stone between them. If you have come down over the Atlas and the ground has turned red and empty, you are almost certainly here.
12, since the 2015 regionalisation reform, which replaced the 16 regions in place since 1997. The twelve have elected regional councils and a wali appointed by the king, and they sit above the provinces and prefectures, which are the tier a number plate encodes. Any map showing 16 Moroccan regions, including several widely used boundary datasets, is drawing the country as it was before 2015.
Tanger-Tetouan, Gharb-Chrarda-Beni Hssen, Taza-Al Hoceima-Taounate, Oriental, Fes-Boulemane, Meknes-Tafilalet, Rabat-Sale-Zemmour-Zaer, Grand Casablanca, Chaouia-Ouardigha, Doukkala-Abda, Marrakech-Tensift-Al Haouz, Tadla-Azilal, Souss-Massa-Draa, Guelmim-Es Semara, Laayoune-Boujdour-Sakia El Hamra and Oued Ed-Dahab-Lagouira. Only the Oriental survived the reform with both its name and roughly its shape.
No, they show the province or prefecture, which is the tier below. A civilian plate is white with black characters and carries a serial number, a single Arabic letter and a one or two digit number that identifies the province. There are far more provinces than regions, so the number narrows you considerably but you still need to know which region the province belongs to. Diplomatic, military and temporary plates use different colours and formats.
Arabic and a Latin transcription, which is usually the French spelling of the place name, and increasingly Tifinagh as well. Tifinagh is the alphabet used to write Amazigh, which became an official language of Morocco in the 2011 constitution, and it appears on newer signs and public buildings. Its angular letterforms are distinctive enough to identify Morocco on their own, since neighbouring Algeria and Tunisia do not sign in it to anything like the same extent.
Yes. Two of the twelve regions, Laayoune-Sakia El Hamra and Dakhla-Oued Ed-Dahab, lie largely or wholly in Western Sahara, a territory the United Nations lists as non-self-governing and whose sovereignty is disputed between Morocco and the Polisario Front. They are regions in Morocco's own administrative division and in the ISO 3166-2 list for Morocco, and Morocco administers most of the territory, so the quiz teaches them the way it teaches the other ten. The game takes no position on the dispute.
The two on the Algerian border, since the Oriental takes the northern half of it and Draa-Tafilalet the southern half. The two Saharan regions, which look alike from the road and are told apart mainly by whether you are nearer Laayoune or Dakhla. And the three along the Atlantic coast, because Rabat-Sale-Kenitra, Casablanca-Settat and Marrakech-Safi are stacked in the same landscape in the same order as their cities.
The two Saharan regions, Laayoune-Sakia El Hamra and Dakhla-Oued Ed-Dahab, are much the largest by area and together make up roughly two fifths of the country. The smallest is Tanger-Tetouan-Al Hoceima in the far north. By population the order is close to reversed: Casablanca-Settat is by far the most populous and the Saharan regions the least, which is why almost everything you will ever see from a Moroccan road is in the northern third of the map.
The other African trainers here are Egypt Governorates, Kenya Counties, Nigeria States, South Africa Provinces and South Africa Dialing Codes. For administrative maps of a similar size, try Netherlands Provinces, France Regions and Poland Voivodeships.
