For Westerners, Morocco’s perceived foreignness gives it an immediate and enduring
fascination – even though it’s just an hour’s ride on the ferry from Spain. And visiting Marrakesh, or Morocco City as early travellers called it, is a good way of getting a taste of the country. This pleasure city, a marketplace where the southern tribesmen and Berber villagers bring in their goods, spend their money and find entertainment, is packed with things to do. So we’re taking the hassle out of trip planning to Morocco and bringing you the places not to miss in Marrakesh -
The Majorelle Garden
The Majorelle Garden, or Jardin Bou Saf, is a meticulously planned twelve-acre botanical
garden, created in the 1920s and 1930s by French painter Jacques Majorelle, and now
owned by fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent. The feeling of tranquillity in the garden is
enhanced by verdant groves of bamboo, dwarf palm and agave, the cactus garden and
the various lily-covered pools. Don’t miss the pavilion – Majorelle’s former studio is now a
museum of Islamic arts exhibiting Saint Laurent’s fine personal collection of North African
carpets, pottery, furniture and doors.
The Koutoubia Mosque
The symbol of Marrakesh, the Koutoubia’s twelfth-century minaret is a dramatic
landmark in the otherwise architecturally sparse Djemaa el Fna square. At nearly seventy
metres high, the minaret is visible for miles on a clear morning and is the oldest and most
complete of the three great Almohad towers. Work on the minaret probably began shortly
after the Almohad conquest of the city, around 1150 – you’ll see in it many of the features
that were to become widespread in Moroccan architecture.
The Bahia
By far the most ambitious and costly of the mansions north of the Mellah was the Bahia
Palace, originally built in 1866–7 for Si Moussa, a former slave who had risen to become
grand vizier. Visitors enter the palace from the west, through an arcaded courtyard which
leads to a small riad (enclosed garden), part of Bou Ahmed’s extension. The riad is decorated
with beautiful carved stucco and cedarwood, with salons leading off it on three sides. The
eastern salon leads through to the council room and then through a vestibule – where it’s
worth pausing to look up at the lovely painted ceiling – to the great courtyard of Si Moussa’s
original palace.
The Djemaa el Fna
There’s nowhere in Morocco like the Djemaa el Fna – no place that so effortlessly
involves you and keeps you coming back for more. You’ll be fascinated by the remedies
of the herb doctors, with their bizarre concoctions spread out before them. Or for a more
traditional entertainment there are performers, too – the square’s acrobats have for years
supplied the European circuses, though they are perhaps never as spectacular as here,
thrust forward into multiple somersaults and contortions in the late afternoon heat.
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