The mandarin is named after this town, but the harvest that made it famous mostly happens elsewhere. Here is what the Nadorcott season involves, why it falls when it does, and what a visitor to Afourar can actually see.
When the harvest happens
Morocco’s Nadorcott harvest runs from January to April, with the bulk of the picking in February and March. Fruit starts appearing in European and North American shops from late January and continues well into spring.
That places it at the end of the Moroccan soft-citrus calendar. The season opens in autumn with clementines; by the time those are finished the Nadorcott is colouring, and it carries supply through to the point where the southern hemisphere takes over.
Why the timing matters
Late ripening is the whole commercial argument for the variety. A mandarin that arrives in November competes with every clementine in the northern hemisphere. A mandarin that arrives in February competes with very little, at a point in the year when consumers still want citrus and supply is thinning. That gap is what a chance seedling found at the INRA station outside Afourar in 1982 happened to fill.
It helps that the fruit holds well on the tree, so growers can spread picking over weeks and respond to the market rather than harvesting everything at once.
The bee problem
The Nadorcott is self-incompatible: its own pollen sets no seed. Pollen from other citrus sets plenty. A block of Nadorcott planted next to another variety, with bees working both, produces fruit full of pips — and a seedy easy-peeler is worth far less than a seedless one.
So the variety is grown in isolation: blocks are separated from other citrus, and in some producing regions bee-keeping near flowering Nadorcott orchards is restricted for the duration. This is one of the more unusual pieces of agricultural coordination in commercial fruit growing, and it dates back to Dr El-Bachir Nadori’s observation in 1988 that the selection would fruit seedlessly if kept away from foreign pollen.
A mandarin with lawyers
The Nadorcott is protected by plant breeders’ rights and grown under licence, and those rights have been litigated in several countries. Growers pay to plant it; the association behind it enforces quality conditions, of which orchard isolation is one. It is an unusually well-documented case of intellectual property in horticulture, and a reason the variety is usually sold under a controlled name — Nadorcott, or in some markets Afourer.
Where it is actually grown
Not here, mostly. Moroccan Nadorcott production is concentrated in Souss-Massa, the Marrakech region, Berkane and the Gharb, across more than 3,000 growers. Around 325,000 tonnes were exported in the 2024/25 season, a sharp increase on the year before as licensing opened the variety to more growers. It is also grown in Spain, South Africa, Australia, Peru, Chile and California.
Afourar’s role was to be the place where the tree was noticed — which happened because the national citrus collection was here, which happened because the Bin El Ouidane water had just made the Tadla plain irrigable.
What you can see around Afourar
Winter is a good time to be here for exactly this reason. The irrigated plain around the town grows citrus among its olives and field crops, and between January and March you will see picking, crates stacked at the field edge, and fruit on every market stall. The weekly souk is the best place to see it in quantity and buy it by the kilo.
The INRA experimental domain on the Beni Mellal–Marrakech road is a working research station, not a visitor attraction; there is no tour. What there is, in season, is very good fruit sold a few kilometres from where the variety started.
Buying and keeping them
- Look for fruit that feels heavy for its size with a slightly loose, pebbled skin — that looseness is what makes it peel.
- Deep orange right into the stem end usually means it was picked ripe.
- They keep for a couple of weeks somewhere cool and dark; refrigeration works but dulls the flavour, so bring them back to room temperature before eating.
- Bought at a Moroccan souk in February, by the crate, they cost a fraction of the supermarket price in Europe for the same variety.