Fantasia Folklore Dinner Show

Overview

The Fantasia is Morocco's great outdoor spectacle — a thunderous re-enactment of tribal cavalry, where lines of horsemen in white gallop the length of an arena and fire their muskets into the air as one. Wrapped around it is an evening of Berber folklore, music and dance, and a Moroccan feast served in enormous embroidered caidal tents. It is loud, theatrical and unashamedly a show, and families and first-timers have a tremendous night out.

Fantasia — tbourida in Arabic — is a genuine Moroccan tradition, a martial art of horsemanship performed at moussems and celebrations across the country, in which a troupe of riders charges in a perfectly straight line and discharges their long-barrelled muskets at the same instant for a single crack of gunpowder. Staged for an audience outside Marrakech, most famously at the long-running Chez Ali, it becomes the centrepiece of a whole evening of pageantry.

You arrive to a fairground-scale setting: dozens of caidal tents — the grand, embroidered tents of tribal chieftains — arranged around an arena, lit with lanterns and lined with low tables and cushions. Before and during dinner, folklore troupes from Morocco's different regions perform in rotation: Berber line-dancers and drummers, gnawa musicians with their iron castanets, Amazigh singers, acrobats and belly dancers, moving between the tents so the entertainment never stops.

Dinner is a hearty Moroccan spread served in the tents — typically harira soup, a chicken or lamb tagine, couscous, and pastries with mint tea — generous rather than refined, in keeping with the celebratory spirit. Then everyone moves out to the arena for the main event: the horsemen thunder past in the dark, the muskets roar, and the show usually builds to a set-piece finale, often a mock-attack on a kasbah, fireworks or a comic flying-carpet act.

No one pretends this is an intimate, authentic village experience — it is a large, polished spectacle designed for coach groups and families, and that is exactly why it works for what it is. Children are enthralled, groups have a ball, and the horsemanship at its heart is the real thing. Go in the right spirit and it is one of the most entertaining nights near Marrakech.