Sidi Ifni tide times

Sidi Ifni is 75 kilometres south of Tiznit, sitting on a sea terrace above a boulder beach on one of the most remote stretches of the Moroccan Atlantic coast. The town is elevated — the central plaza and the old Spanish administrative buildings stand 30 to 40 metres above the ocean on a flat terrace, with the cliff dropping straight to the rocky shore below. The tidal regime is semidiurnal mesotidal, with a mean range of approximately 1.7 metres at Chart Datum and spring range around 2.2 metres. The town was a Spanish enclave — the Ifni province — until it was ceded to Morocco in 1969; the colonial infrastructure remains.

The Spanish occupation left a distinctive architectural layer: the town centre has a working Art Deco colonial building stock — the former governor's palace, a circular post office, the Spanish consulate, the church — built in the 1930s and 1940s in a style that mixed Spanish colonial with Art Deco motifs and local Moroccan elements. Most buildings are intact and in use, though some are in gradual decay. The harbour crane from the Spanish era still stands on the coast below the town; it was the mechanism for the cable car system that loaded and unloaded cargo from ships anchored offshore when the coast was too exposed for a conventional harbour approach.

The boulder beach below the terrace is exposed to open Atlantic swell with no offshore protection. The swell reaches the coast from the northwest and west; the beach receives 1 to 3 metre surf regularly from October through March. The rocks below the cliff face are covered at high water and partially exposed at low water — the intertidal zone here is a wide stretch of tumbled boulders with rock pools. Fishing from the rocks at low water targets grouper, sea bass, and bream; the clarity of the water in the rock pools is notable given the Atlantic swell energy.

The surf at Sidi Ifni is not organised around named breaks in the way Taghazout is — there are beach and reef breaks north and south of the town that work on northwest swells, but the infrastructure for surf tourism is minimal compared to the Taghazout coast. The remoteness and the colonial town aesthetic attract a different type of visitor: overland travellers, photographers, and surfers looking for uncrowded waves rather than surf camp packages.

The market day in Sidi Ifni is Sunday — the largest weekly souk on this section of coast, with Berber traders arriving from the Anti-Atlas interior. Argan products, Tiznit silver, Saharan minerals, and agricultural produce from the Souss hinterland all move through the market. The town has a small selection of guesthouses and riads; the nearest city is Tiznit (75 km north) or Guelmim (75 km southeast), making Sidi Ifni a genuine endpoint rather than a transit stop.

Tide predictions on this page come from Open-Meteo Marine, a gridded global ocean model. Accuracy is typically within plus or minus 45 minutes on timing and 0.2 to 0.3 metres on height. For authoritative official tide predictions for this section of the Moroccan Atlantic coast, consult SHOMAR — Service Hydrographique et Océanographique de la Marine.