The residents of Asni, a village in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains, describe the snow-capped view as “paradise”. Above them is the tallest peak in North Africa, Mount Toubkal, which seems right there but is in fact a two-to-three-day hike from the nearest road — getting to which is itself a treacherous drive of several hours, usually requiring a 4×4 vehicle to coil around bone-dry gorges and navigate hairpin bends.
The russet-coloured valley that leads towards Toubkal is a beautiful, sweeping land where the silence is amplified only by the sudden noises that break it: a farmer collecting twigs for a fire, dogs barking, or a muezzin’s cry from the mosque. Not so long ago, the unique sense of place was marked also by the sight of the Berber communities on the mountainside, with their low, flat-topped homes and rough-textured dried mud walls.
These are gone now. In September 2023, the most violent earthquake the Al Haouz region has suffered destroyed 95 per cent of the buildings in Asni, which became a hub for a wider relief response that followed due to its proximity to Marrakech, an hour or so to the north.
In total, the quake killed 2,960 and injured 5,674, but a much bigger one earlier in the year on the border of Turkey and Syria caught more international attention due to the level of devastation, which included the loss of more than 50,000 lives.
On the face of it, given the logistical challenges of getting materials to the places that needed them the most, it is impressive that Asni has since been rebuilt, literally brick by brick. The majority of the new masonry on these homes, however, remains exposed and the grey colouring of the blocks is out of keeping with the natural tones of the surrounding terrain.
Visible scars remain in Asni, which from a distance now looks like a mining town, albeit without the employment that would come with that industry. It nevertheless remains a place of activity, where tagines simmer on charcoal braziers and men in their cloaks use the midweek market to try to sell copper bracelets.
(Simon Hughes/The Athletic)
One of them approaches me, and though he refuses to give his name at any point in a discussion that subsequently lasts over an hour, “because what has happened here is about everyone, not me”, he is willing to share his story in impressive English boosted by communication with relief workers, detailing how he feels about the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations being held in Morocco while the struggle in parts of the country such as Asni remains as raw as this.
The village is a dot amid a harsh, largely inhospitable geography, but it would be wrong to conclude that the threat of nature was a day-to-day feature of mountain life. Though an earthquake had struck Agadir, 250km (roughly 160 miles) away in 1960, killing around 15,000, nobody in Asni knew what was happening when the world around them began to fall apart just past 11pm on September 8, 2023.
Initially, there were two movements, with the ground jolting in one direction before sharply surging back the other way. The lights went out, and a huge rock crashed into the village from the ridgeline of the mountain above it. It sounded like a bomb had gone off, and if you were outside drinking tea, you were safer than if you’d already gone to bed.
Dawn was still five or six hours away, and lots of people ran out onto the streets without warm clothing. They slept, if they could, in the cold, huddling together against the elements. Only at sunrise did they appreciate how bad things were. Many of the buildings were damaged beyond repair and those still standing, on closer inspection, had enormous cracks in them.
Asni was a place where nothing had changed for generations. Now, suddenly, everything was different. Its sense of idyll shattered. For more than a year, its main square was like a war zone, becoming a tented camp, where washing lines served as makeshift fences.
Collapsed buildings in the aftermath of the earthquake in September 2023 (Nathan Laine/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Yet it was worse in other parts of the Atlas Mountains, where some places, a day from any recognisable track, were unreachable for months.
It was only through the determination of Sarah Barden that the body of her father, David, was repatriated so quickly, after a hotel ceiling collapsed on him following an aftershock near the remote Tizi n’Test pass. David, 71, was a retired Liverpool supporter on a cycling trip. Having arrived in Morocco 48 hours earlier, he was the only Briton to lose his life in the earthquake — a reminder that the disaster had consequences for people from other areas of the world.
Initially, the hardest part, according to my anonymous unofficial guide of Asni, was the impact on younger people who were suddenly left without education. With the schools destroyed, the only solution was to get them enrolled elsewhere. Less than a week after the earthquake, buses were taking them to stay in Marrakech, where they lived with all of the things they needed, except for their families, who they did not see until the holidays.
Our guide says one of his daughters had nightmares that another earthquake would happen and in Marrakech, she had nobody to comfort her. This still upsets him.
There is evidence of AFCON 2025 on the road that leads to Asni. In a town called Tahnaout, there is a five-a-side football pitch with synthetic grass that has bunting and flags of each of the 24 competing nations. Kids run about with a ball, enjoying themselves. Yet since the earthquake, the focus on public spending has sharpened in Morocco, with protestors taking to the streets last year, drawing attention to the country’s stadium-building at a time when other services are neglected.
People in Asni do not always feel a part of the same argument. It is pointed out that Morocco’s hosting of this AFCON was happening before the earthquake struck and since that day, the village has received support from the government.
“Football can help Morocco’s image,” says my guide, who believes the tournament will encourage more visitors to return to the Atlas Mountains, which had an emerging holiday industry before the earthquake. Tycoon Richard Branson had opened a luxury retreat not far from Asni, for example. But since the disaster, there has been a “quake fear” which has tourists hesitant over coming back, while hoteliers have been reluctant to discuss the challenges they face as they do not want to put more people off.
The victims of the earthquake were not neglected financially. The Moroccan government allocated support, with aid coming in at around £12,000 ($16,000 at the current rate) for the rebuilding of a house and nearly £7,000 for damaged homes, as well as £200 per month assistance for each household. Considering the average agricultural worker earned just £7.50 ($10) per day, these were huge sums.
(Simon Hughes/The Athletic)
Yet the relief did not last for long, and once it was gone, it was gone. In Asni, poorer families say wealthier ones with more connections were serviced first, leaving those who needed help most at the back of the queue.
Berber communities would have preferred to rebuild in mud, given their old properties had stood for hundreds of years without any problems before such an extreme event. They say that brick makes the homes too cold to live in during winter and unbearably hot in the summer. Some of them remain hollowed out, with families giving up on Asni for a new life in cities as far away as Casablanca (288km/nearly 200 miles).
One family have clung on to what remains of their mud home, separating their time between a concrete outhouse that was not destroyed, and a container nearby that was supposed to be a temporary solution to their problems. The outhouse stands beside a palm tree, brought from the Sahara desert 30 years ago, which still just about grows dates. The space in front of it used to be the kitchen but now it is covered in rubbish, swept in on gusts of wind from the mountain.
The site is like an open wound, reminding you that Asni is still a place of trauma.