Customs of Morocco — Etiquette, Greetings, Mosques

Morocco is relaxed with visitors and forgiving of mistakes. Still, a handful of the customs of Morocco change how you are received — greetings, the right hand, photography, and knowing which buildings you may enter. None of them are difficult, and all of them are noticed.

Search for Morocco culture etiquette and you will find lists of prohibitions written from outside. This page explains the logic instead, because the logic is what you can actually apply when something unexpected happens. (If you came looking for border customs and allowances, that is entry requirements.)

Greetings, and the phrase that changes the temperature of a room

Salam alaikum — peace be upon you. The answer is wa alaikum salam.

Say it walking into a shop, a café, a taxi, a village house. In Morocco you greet before you transact; walking up to a stall and opening with a price is the equivalent of ignoring a shopkeeper’s face. Two seconds of greeting changes the whole exchange, and often the price.

Add labas? — how are you? — and do not wait for a real answer. It is a formula, like “all right?” in Britain. More of the useful vocabulary is in language in Morocco.

Handshakes, and what to do when no hand is offered

Between men, handshakes are automatic and often long, sometimes followed by touching the right hand to the heart.

Between men and women, wait. Some Moroccan women shake hands, some do not, and there is no way to know by looking. If a hand is offered, take it. If it is not, put your right hand flat on your chest and nod. That gesture is warm, completely standard, and nobody is embarrassed by it.

Kissing on the cheek happens between friends of the same sex and between family. It is not a greeting for strangers.

Hospitality, and the tea sequence explained

Moroccan hospitality carries an obligation, and it runs in the direction you would not expect: the host is obliged, not the guest. A family will feed you food they cannot easily spare, and being told so would horrify them.

Refusing the first glass of tea is close to refusing the household. Refusing the third is normal — three glasses is the traditional sequence and everyone knows the third is optional. If you cannot drink more, take the glass, hold it, and set it down. The gesture is what is being offered.

Do not offer money for hospitality in a home. If you want to reciprocate, bring something the next time, or send photographs.

Eating: the right hand, the shared plate, the bread

Eat with the right hand. The left is reserved for washing and is considered unclean, which matters most when the food is shared from one dish and bread is the utensil, which it usually is.

From a communal tagine, eat the wedge in front of you rather than reaching across. The host will push the best pieces of meat towards you; that is deliberate and you should eat them.

Bread is not a side dish, it is the cutlery. Tear it with the right hand. Do not put it on the floor, and do not throw it away in front of anyone — bread has a status here that takes visitors by surprise.

Photography: asking, paying, and the real numbers

Ask before photographing any person. A camera raised at a woman without a word is a genuine offence rather than a small faux pas, and it is the single most common thing our guides have to stop clients doing.

On Jemaa el-Fna, photographs of the water sellers, the musicians and the snake handlers are a paid transaction, not a scene. Agree the amount before the shutter: 10 to 20 dirhams is normal, per person photographed. Agree it afterwards and the number becomes 100 and there is a scene.

Do not photograph inside mosques, at police or military installations, or at border posts. Nobody minds a camera in the souk pointed at objects.

Mosques: which you can enter, and the madrasas that are better anyway

With very few exceptions, mosques in Morocco are closed to non-Muslims. This is unusual in the region and it surprises people who have been to Istanbul or Cairo.

The exception is the Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca, which admits visitors on guided tours outside prayer times. The twelfth-century Tin Mal mosque in the High Atlas was the other one, and it was badly damaged in the 2023 earthquake — check whether it has reopened before you build a day around it. That is very nearly the whole list. On maps and street signs mosques are labelled in French. Search mosquée Marrakech and you will get several hundred results, and you may enter none of them.

What you can enter, and should:

• Madrasas — the old religious colleges. Ben Youssef in Marrakech, Bou Inania and Al-Attarine in Fes. These are the finest interiors in the country and they are open to everyone.
• Zaouias and shrines — courtyards often, prayer halls no.
• Mosque courtyards in some places, where a scarf over the head is polite for women.

You can always look at the minaret, and the Koutoubia gardens at dusk are worth an hour on their own.

Shoes, homes, and what to bring if you are invited

Shoes come off at the door of a home, and in any carpeted room — including the upstairs showroom of a rug shop.

If you are invited to eat, bring pastries, dates, sugar or fruit. Not alcohol, unless you know the household drinks. Not flowers, which read as odd. Sugar cones wrapped in blue paper are the traditional gift and still entirely correct.

Expect to stay longer than you planned. Leaving straight after the meal is abrupt; another glass of tea is the polite exit.

What do people wear in Morocco, and where it matters

In Casablanca and the Gueliz district of Marrakech, roughly what people wear in southern Spain. In medinas, small towns and villages, considerably more covered.

For visitors the working rule is shoulders and knees, and its purpose is practical rather than moral: it reduces the attention you attract. Nobody needs to cover their hair. Men in shorts inland read as being on their way to a beach that is 200 km away. The full version, by region and season, is in the packing and dress guide.

Ramadan

For a month, most of the country fasts between dawn and sunset — no food, no water, no cigarettes.

Eating, drinking or smoking in the street in daylight is legal for visitors and conspicuous. Tourist restaurants and riads serve normally; local cafés close, and many shops keep half hours. Your driver and your guide will be fasting, so plan a lighter day and do not schedule a long drive to end at sunset, because the roads at ftour are genuinely dangerous — everyone is hurrying home to eat.

Then the sun goes down and the country turns on. If a family invites you to break the fast with them, cancel whatever else you had planned.

Alcohol

Legal, and sold in licensed restaurants, hotel bars and the big supermarkets in the new towns. Not sold inside medinas. Not drunk in the street by anyone, ever.

Buying it is unremarkable; being visibly drunk in public is not, and it is one of the few things that will genuinely lower how you are treated. During Ramadan, most shops stop selling to anyone.

Friday, and the rhythm of the week

Friday is the day of congregational prayer. Around midday, shops shut for an hour or two, streets empty, and traffic in the medina falls away.

It is also couscous day in most households — the one meal of the week that is fixed, eaten after prayers, and the best thing to be invited to. Museums and monuments keep normal hours; small shops do not. Plan Friday lunchtime as a slow lunch rather than an errand.

Public affection, and the honest position

Holding hands is fine. Anything beyond it — kissing, embracing — is not done in public by Moroccans, gay or straight, and doing it marks you as a visitor rather than causing offence.

For LGBTQ+ travellers the position is less comfortable: same-sex relations are criminalised in Moroccan law. Prosecution of foreign visitors is effectively unheard of, and the practical guidance is the same discretion every Moroccan couple exercises. It is covered honestly, alongside the rest, in is Morocco safe.

Two men walking arm in arm is friendship, not romance. It carries none of the meaning it would at home.

The henna, the monkey and the snake

Three street transactions in Marrakech that catch everyone.

Henna: someone takes your hand and starts drawing. The monkey: it lands on your shoulder before you have spoken. The snake: the same, with a photograph. All three end with a price named after the fact, and it is high.

None of this is dangerous and none of it is a custom. It is trade. The counter is to refuse before contact — hands in pockets, la, shukran, keep walking. Once you are holding the monkey the negotiation has already gone badly.

Tipping, briefly

Small, frequent and in cash. Round up the taxi. Ten or twenty dirhams for a bag carried. Two to five for a parking attendant. Ten to twenty per photograph. The full table, by role, is in money and tipping.

Have small notes on you at all times. Nothing about the customs in Morocco is harder than tipping correctly with only a 200 dirham note.

The customs of Morocco visitors break without noticing

• Transacting before greeting. The single most common one.
• Photographing a woman without asking. Not a small thing.
• Refusing everything. Turning down tea, then bread, then a seat reads as distrust.
• Discussing the monarchy or Western Sahara casually. Both are sensitive; wait to be asked.
• Haggling hard and then not buying. Bargaining is a conversation with an implied ending. Walking away is fine; walking away after twenty minutes at an agreed price is not.
• Waving money about, or handing it over with the left hand.
• Loud voices in a riad. They are houses with hard surfaces and everyone can hear you.

None of this is fragile. Moroccan culture and customs absorb visitors easily, and the goodwill available to someone who greets, uses the right hand and asks before photographing is genuinely large.

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Our guides brief clients on all of this on the first morning, in the car, before it can matter. Meet the team, or tell us what you want from your trip.