My intervention focuses on data collected during a 17-month anthropological field research project (March to May 2018, then March 2022 to May 2023) in the village of Merzouga, located in the Sahara of southeastern Morocco, that mainly lives from tourism. The village’s inhabitants are mostly nomads from the Ait Khebbach tribal group, who settled near Erg Chebbi because of oasis agriculture from the 1950s onwards. Since the 1980s, the dunes (measuring 24 x 8 km) have been attracting increasing numbers of Western and, since the 2000s, national tourists. As a result, local residents are increasingly developing tourist activities. The arrival of tourists has triggered a process of enhancement of the environment (the desert landscape), the intangible and tangible heritage (Amazigh and nomadic), and led to an improvement in the quality of life of the inhabitants (economic development, access to school education, access to medical services).

Since 2016, an explosion in what could be described as “mass” tourism has left its mark: the area around Erg Chebbi, and especially Merzouga, is marked by bivouacs (around 150) and hotels (around  100). An emergence of “luxury” structures with swimming pools, air-conditioning and heating is attracting a more affluent clientele, bringing the number of monthly tourists to almost 12,000 in a region with a population of 7,000. Nevertheless, my fieldwork, which consisted of a one-year stay with a family owning an agency, a hotel, and a bivouac in Merzouga, and five months of interviews and visits with other families in the village, revealed that tourism is still organized by the locals.

My intervention thus falls within the scope of the “issues and effects of the rediscovery by tourism of certain territories hitherto largely untouched by tourism”: rural areas, fringe areas, urban districts, as it questions the forms of change and continuity that nomads negotiate through their involvement in tourism, in its current form.

The wealth of data facilitates an analysis that takes into account the points of negotiation between local actors. I focus here on the implications of tourism development in Merzouga for local people in relation to their family organization. As former nomads accustomed to organizing themselves in tribal structures and far removed from state influences, families are organized in roles of status, age, and gender, which are negotiated within the new tourism businesses. I thus examine how changes to a mobile way of life make it easier for nomads to adapt to new circumstances.