Hard but sweet-smelling slog in Morocco’s Valley of the Roses

  • Date: 04-May-2021
  • Source: Gulf Today
  • Sector:Industrial
  • Country:Gulf
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Hard but sweet-smelling slog in Morocco’s Valley of the Roses

A kilo of essential oils requires between four and five tons of flowers.

 

The heady aroma of the Rosa Damascena, a variety introduced in the days of the caravan trade, perfumes hedges and fields irrigated by two wadis between the mountains and the Sahara desert.

 

 A worker harvests roses in a field by the city of Kelaat Mgouna.

 

Everything revolves around roses: the names of hotels, cosmetics sold in countless stores, necklaces offered by children in the streets.

 

The annual festival in the town of Kelaat Mgouna -- with a rose statue at its centre -- attracted thousands of visitors before Covid-19.

 

 'Lucky to be poor'

 

The 35-year-old happily left her job in a packaging factory to manage the Rosamgoun cooperative, a small distillery set up by two sisters who grow roses.

 

The work is much better paid, 2,500 dirhams ($280) a month, almost the official minimum wage in Morocco, instead of 400 dirhams a month at the factory.

And the unit of five employees feels "like a family".

 

Rochdi Bouker, head of the Moroccan growers and processors association, Fimarose, sees the rose as "an engine of local development", banking on the global vogue for natural raw materials and organic products.

 

 Workers carry sacks of roses harvested from a field