Yoga & Pilates Retreat Sahara Morocco

Practising on sand changes the practice

Every floor you have practised on is flat, level and predictable. That is what makes a studio teachable: the ground gives the same answer every time.

Sand does not. It moves under load, it is never level twice, and it exposes every compensation the body has learned to hide. A warrior pose held on a dune face involves muscles that a studio floor lets you skip. Nobody finds this out by being told; they find it out in the first ten minutes.

This is not a gimmick. It is the reason instructors bring groups here rather than somewhere with a nicer studio.

The temperature decides the timetable

Practice happens at first light, usually starting between six and half past, when the sand is still cold and the air has not arrived. This is not a style choice. By ten in the morning from March onward, the surface temperature makes mat work unpleasant.

A second session at dusk works well from October to February. In the hotter months we move it inside the lounge tent or onto the shaded terrace.

What the camp provides

A prepared flat area on firm sand, levelled and swept before each session, large enough for twenty mats. It is set away from the tents so the group is not practising in front of an audience.

Mats, blocks, straps and bolsters. Bring your own mat if you are attached to it, but you do not have to.

A lounge tent with a level wooden floor for reformer work, rain, wind or heat. It takes twelve comfortably.

Sound, if you want it, and complete silence if you do not. Erg Chegaga has no traffic and no neighbours, so a silent practice here is genuinely silent.

For instructors bringing a group

You lead. We handle everything else: transfers from M’Hamid or a helicopter from Marrakech, all meals with dietary requirements taken seriously, the camp privatised so no other guest walks through your session.

The camp takes up to twenty guests in eight tents, each with its own bathroom, or twenty four in twelve double tents. Most instructors bring between eight and sixteen, which leaves room to breathe.

We do not take a cut of your programme and we do not put our name on it. You are renting a venue that happens to be in the middle of the Sahara.

The rest of the day

Between sessions the desert does the work: walking with nomads, sandboarding, bread baked in the sand, a camel ride timed for the light, and a Bortle Class 1 sky with a telescope on one of the nights.

Most groups find that the afternoon of the second day is when people stop checking a phone that has no signal anyway.

How to come

Three to seven nights, October to April, camp privatised for your group. Tell us your dates, your group size and whether you need reformer space, and we will send the programme and the terms in writing before anything is paid.