Toubkal National Park, Morocco: Great Basin's Sister Park

By Ben Roberts, Chief of Natural Resource Management, Great Basin National Park. Written in 2016.

Toubkal National Park, in central-western Morocco.

A new partnership

In January 2016, the Department of the Interior's International Technical Assistance Program (ITAP) asked Great Basin National Park to partner with Toubkal National Park in Morocco as a sister park.

• Funding: ITAP pays for travel — technical assistance and exchanges for both Park Service and Toubkal staff. Beyond this year, there's no long-term commitment of money or staff time, though ongoing contact is encouraged.
• What Toubkal needs help with: managing tourism; managing for and with local communities; infrastructure and facilities; conservation and restoration of habitats and key species; and communication and partnership with stakeholders around the park.

A mouflon, a subspecies of wild sheep.

About Toubkal

• Where: the High Atlas mountains of central-western Morocco.
• Established: 1942 — Morocco's first national park.
• Size: about 93,900 acres; about 40,000 visitors a year.
• The draw: hiking, especially to the summit of Jbel Toubkal — at 13,671 feet, the highest peak in North Africa.
• Wildlife: rare Barbary sheep, leopards and macaques, and an alpine lake.
• People: Morocco has been inhabited since the Paleolithic, and the park holds more than 5,000 years of documented human history.

A different kind of park: many Moroccan parks contain villages and farming, because people lived and worked there long before the parks were made. Snowmelt feeds streams used for crops and livestock.

A village in Toubkal National Park.

Sources

Based on "Introducing Sister Park: Toubkal National Park in Morocco," by Ben Roberts, The Midden — Great Basin National Park, Vol. 16, No. 1, Summer 2016, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.