Nador

Beni Ensar sits directly on the frontier with Melilla, the Spanish autonomous city, roughly 15 km from Nador. The two ports share facilities.

This creates a choice most travellers never realise they have: you can reach this corner of Morocco by sailing to Nador, or by sailing to Melilla and crossing the land border. The second option is a domestic Spanish ferry with no maritime border formalities — you take the border on foot instead. Which is faster depends entirely on the queue on the day, and the queue is unpredictable.

From our timetable, Nador is connected to three countries:

• Almería — 6 sailings, the main link and by far the most searched, shared by Baleària, GNV, Naviera Armas and Trasmediterránea.
• Barcelona and Sète in France — 2 sailings each with GNV. These are long hauls that skip the Spanish road entirely.
• Motril — in the network at around 5 hours, though we hold no current sailings.

Sète to Nador looks eccentric until you price the alternative. For anyone driving from northern Europe, sailing from the French Mediterranean coast removes the entire length of Spain — roughly 1,200 km of motorway, two nights of hotels or a very long day, and the fuel and tolls that go with them.

The crossing is long and the sailings are few, so it needs booking well ahead. But as a way of moving a loaded car between Europe and eastern Morocco, it beats the drive on most measures except flexibility.

Nador is a working port serving the eastern Rif and, above all, the seasonal movement of the Moroccan community in Europe. The passenger peak runs from mid-June to mid-September, coordinated with the Spanish side, and it is heavily vehicle traffic: families with loaded cars rather than foot passengers with cabin bags.

That shapes the experience. Expect car decks to be the constraint, expect formalities to take longer in peak weeks, and expect the port to be busiest in the direction that everyone else is going — south in July, north in late August.

Nador opens the eastern side of Morocco: Oujda and the Algerian frontier to the southeast, the Rif mountains and Al Hoceima to the west, Fes to the south. The road network from here is good and the distances are long.

This is the practical reason to sail to Nador rather than to Tangier — landing at the Strait and then driving east costs the better part of a day.

Arriving from Spain at Nador is a full international entry: passports, Moroccan immigration, and customs formalities for the vehicle including a temporary import declaration. None of this is difficult, but all of it takes time, and it takes considerably more time in August than in April.

Have the vehicle registration document to hand rather than in the boot, and expect the process to happen on the quay rather than in a terminal building.

The Almería link runs year round. The long routes to Barcelona and Sète are thinner and more seasonal, and the Motril service comes and goes.

Outside the summer operation the port is quiet and the crossings are straightforward. Inside it, everything — sailings, cabins, car spaces, the border queue at Melilla — needs booking and patience in roughly equal measure.