How A Moroccan Entrepreneur Built A Luxury Hotel Oasis At The Sahara’s Edge

M’Hamid El Ghizlane is the end of the road. Not in a figurative or literary way. It’s simply the end: no more pavement, no more pathway, just the vast shifting seas of Sahara Desert’s sands. In this last stop in Morocco’s southern Zagora Province, old hand-painted signs still point the way to Timbuktu. It’s 50 days away by camel caravan.

Now, of course, one can get to Mali a bit faster with a 4x4. But M’Hamid, an oasis town of about 7,500 inhabitants, still retains its end-of-the-road air: backpacker hotels and cafés, a cloud of dust hanging in the air, shops selling handmade rugs and long scarves to fashion into turbans—necessary accoutrements for anyone who wants to venture out into the dunes—and some rudimentary adventure tourism infrastructure.

It's the last place you’d expect to find a luxurious palace hotel with gardens draped in bougainvillea, a large swimming pool and guest rooms tricked out with European-style comforts. And yet there one is.

Sbai Palace sits on the outskirts of town, in a ruined kasbah that had all but fallen down less than a decade ago. And if the place is unlikely, the story of the visionary who brought it to life is even more so.

Mohamed Sbai, who grew up around M’Hamid El Ghizlane in a semi-nomadic family, has been an eager entrepreneur from an early age. In the desert, he took care of his family’s camels and sheep until he arrived in the village at age 14 and found some tourists who wanted to pay him to take them out camping with his camels. Interest grew slowly, but it grew, and by age 18, he got himself a government license as an official tour guide.

A couple years later, in 1995, he opened a travel agency in M’Hamid, from which he and his team took tourists around Morocco, Western Sahara, Mauritania and Mali, and then he added a second office in the bigger desert-tourism hub of Ouarzazate. He was 20 years old and had 15 employees.

One of Sbai’s early clients was the prolific American meteorite hunter Michael Farmer, who introduced him to the space rock business. The Moroccan was quickly hooked. He began not only hunting the precious stones but creating a supply chain with desert nomads from all over the world, selling the stones they all found, and traveling to important gem shows from Tucson, Arizona, to Japan, India, Chile, Brazil, Australia and Africa. Celebrities and museums bought his wares. By 2018, he’d earned about $1.4 million.

“I could have taken this money and made a nice life for myself in Las Vegas,” he says. Instead, he decided to buy the kasbah, create Sbai Palace, open several other properties, and invest in tourism development in his hometown. “I like my area. I like my family. I want to leave something from me to my area. If I don’t do it, nobody does it.”

And if it weren’t for tourism, young people would do nothing, or they would leave. Instead, Sbai’s projects support 35 families. “All the workers are from the village. I’m happy to teach and train,” he adds, noting that there’s no tourism school anywhere nearby, and that he’s often the one demonstrating how a bed is made or a table is set.

The palace, which fully opened last year, is a stunner, inspired by the luxury hotels Sbai stayed in while traveling on the international gemstone circuit, but distinctly of its place. While it’s tempting to compare it to other desert-frontier hotels such as Dar Ahlam, Sbai Palace is a world of its own: less French restraint, more Moroccan exuberance. It’s not as design-forward as some of the country’s hotels, but the artisanship is strong. There’s stained glass windows in the rooms, oversize black-and-white portraits hanging above the beds, and elaborately carved cedar ceilings.

Between the main palace, a second large-ish building, and some newly built cottages around the gardens, it has 40 rooms. But it never feels crowded, with its big dining room (which is supplied in large part with vegetables grown in Sbai’s gardens behind the hotel), alcoves beside the pool and various terraces for dining or sunbathing. But it’s also not crowded because guests still go out and play in the sand.

The hotel has hosted yoga retreats and invited artists to be in residence, but the main focus is the desert adventures that put M’Hamid El Ghizlane on the (edge of) the map in the first place. Guests can cruise around the dunes on ATVs, but most opt to make camel treks. It’s more accurate to call them hikes, as the camels are used as pack animals. Most visitors head out for a night or two, but Sbai’s team will organize them for two weeks or longer.

Local guides lead private excursions across the lunar landscapes of the Sahara’s stone plateaus, then set up simple camps beneath acacia trees where they cook tagines or lentil stew over campfires. After lunch and naps, there’s time to climb up and slide down the soft dunes, snap the obligatory camel-riding photographs and watch the magnificent sunset, before they cook another meal and hand out sleeping bags. There are no tents—just a brilliant canopy of stars overhead.

It's a magical experience, but one that’s not for everyone. Perhaps that’s why a growing number of “luxury” camps have sprung up in the region. When Sbai Palace was still in its friends and family phase, some guests combined their palace stays with a night in one of those camps—and were disappointed.

So in 2023, as Mohamed Sbai was still finishing work on the palace, he decided to set up his own luxury camp as well. This opened four months ago with four large luxury tents with big hotel-style beds and full bathrooms, nine simpler but comfortable tents, a dining tent and an outdoor area. Sbai has plans to plant about a thousand desert palm trees around it, turning it into a proper oasis.

For now, the wonder is at night. After dinner, guests lounge on carpets and cushions beside a campfire, listening to young musicians from M’Hamid and nomadic communities, perhaps preparing to launch their own dreams into the world.

By Ann Abel