Lost in Time,Far from Morocco’s well-trodden tourist

Far from Morocco’s well-trodden tourist route lies Taroudant, a remote market town where a colorful group of expats have create a most stylish haven. See the interactive slide show

As they often have, Jacques and Bernadette Chirac spent the All Saints Day break last year at La Gazelle d’Or hotel in the small southern Moroccan city of Taroudant. Based on reports in the French media, however, it was not much of a holiday for the former first couple. A story in the newsweekly Le Point had Madame Chirac berating her husband in public (“You’re nothing but the rustling wings of an insect,” she is said to have informed him.) According to another story, in Le Monde, when their daughter Claude read that “le Palais” — meaning Morocco’s King Mohammed VI — often picks up the Chiracs’ bill at the hotel, she went into damage-control mode, promptly canceling the five rooms they had reserved for Christmas.

It was a rare flicker in the floodlights for Taroudant, which nudges the Sahara and is set on a lush agricultural plain that crashes into the foothills of the Atlas Mountains. Connoisseurs of the Arab Mediterranean find the place heaven, but it is not to every taste. Unlike Marrakesh, 140 miles to the north, there are no stoplights here, no branded hotels, no expats living out Scheherazade fantasies in glittery riads. The sole noteworthy monument is the nearly five miles of beautiful pisé, or rammed-earth, ramparts wrapping the medina. Knotted bundles of lamb tripe dry on lines in the open air, and cheerfully painted horse-drawn buggies are not used mostly by tourists, as one might expect, but by locals as a cheap alternative to taxis. Winters are made for palm-grove picnics in shirtsleeves, but summers are too chokingly hot for even a bikini. If you want to buy wine, say, or cheese or crème fraîche, you have to go to Agadir, an hour away on the Atlantic coast.

While serious development is now under way outside the medina, most of the population is still jammed inside the city’s crenelated walls. As such, Taroudant retains the inscrutable aura of the small caravan trading outpost it was in the 16th century.

“We’re a lot less in the real world here,” says Chris O’Byrne, a French journalist who owns the Aziyade maison d’hôte and worked in Paris for many years for the lifestyle magazine Côté Sud. “There’s not a lot going on. That’s the point. You need an interest in nature if you want to live in Taroudant, and a rich interior life. There are days when I would kill for a bookstore or museum.”

The very absence of basic institutions and services has helped preserve the city, making it a magnet in recent years for a tightknit population of expats. This group is larger, more competitive and more concerned with niceties like placement and finger bowls than one might guess. Taroudant society is still recovering from the 2011 death of the hyper-realist Chilean painter Claudio Bravo, whose palace in the countryside was the scene of dinners where the caviar and foie gras flowed like mint tea. Gone is the ballast he supplied. But life goes on, almost as hectic.

“In Taroudant you need an agenda just for your social engagements,” says Mina Sarrat, a Moroccan real estate agent who steers foreigners through the minefield of buying property locally. Due to common law, you can own the dirt an argan tree is planted in, but not the tree itself, and be a legitimate title holder without the title to prove it.

“You meet the most improbable people here,” she adds, “people you wouldn’t meet anywhere else. Socially we live at 100 miles an hour, and we have our own highly functioning grapevine: ‘le téléphone Arabe.’ I tell you, you tell Chris, Chris tells. . . . ”

Architecturally, Taroudant has little of the pedigree of other Moroccan cities. It squeaked through the nation’s years as a French protectorate, from 1912 to 1956, without the addition of the kind of European-style “ville nouvelle” that sprung up in Rabat, Fez and Casablanca.

“During heavy rains, I’ve seen some of the old pisé buildings collapse like sand castles,” O’Byrne says. While stretches of the ancient ramparts have been rebuilt to match the originals, much of the rest of the city is a bland essay in concrete and cinder blocks. Nonetheless, O’Byrne’s crowd prefers the bombed-out lots of their medina and (relative) modesty of their homes to what they view as the Orientalist excess encountered elsewhere. The cult of decay — finding beauty in blight, in even urban banality — has a long tradition in Morocco. A certain flyblown quality gave frissons to generations of aesthetes, from the socialite David Herbert to the illustrator Pierre Le-Tan.

The town’s humility is the basis for an operatic strain of chauvinism among the foreign set. “Those poor Marrakeshi with their bling bling, they have no idea how to live,” says the Belgian decorator Christophe Decarpentrie, who moved here part-time in 2002 with his partner in life and business, Abel Naessens. Between them they own four houses with a total of 22 bedrooms in Taroudant, for no other reason than they bore easily, can afford them and love lending them out to friends. Decarpentrie rules the beau monde in Taroudant. He styles himself a sort of pasha, and people treat him like one.

“A wealthy Brazilian woman came to stay with me,” he recalls. “She was traveling with a four-wheel drive for the country and a limousine for the city. ‘Where are the boutiques?’ she asked. She hadn’t even unpacked.” The next day, she was gone.

Even when Farah Pahlavi hosts a party, Decarpentrie says, simplicity is the rule. Though Pahlavi was exiled along with her husband, the Shah, in the 1979 Iranian revolution, everyone addresses her as Shahbanou anyway, as if she were still on the throne.

“Even if she is always surrounded by a Persian court and our king treats her like she still reigns, the way Farah entertains is so understated, so chic,” Decarpentrie says. “The staff eat first, then the guests are served, and after that we all dance together — the waiters, the gardeners — too much fun!” He adds: “She loves it here because she says it reminds her of her childhood in Tehran in the ’40s and ’50s.”

Although the exalted style of living practiced by some Westerners evokes the days of French colonialism, the first among them began debarking as recently as 1999. “If there were four cars in Taroudant back then, that was a lot,” Karl Morcher remembers. Drunk on the place’s scrappy charms, Morcher, an ageless, worldly, voluptuously idle character of a type once common in Morocco, and his partner, Abdelmajid Dkhil, later built a vast compound on the outskirts of town, where they live in rooms of perfect Balzacian proportions filled with Jean-Michel Frank furniture, Berber carvings and Dadaist paintings.

Arnaud Maurières and Eric Ossart parachuted into Taroudant the same year, trailing their fame as garden designers who revolutionized public plantings in France by replacing grannyish pointillist flower beds with fluid, meadowlike compositions. After restoring a riad for themselves in the medina, Maurières, who is brisk and vivid, and Ossart, enigmatic and detached, received commissions for gardens and rammed-earth houses and renovations from Pahlavi, the horticultural magnate Henri Delbard and the owners of Dar Zahia, a handsome bed and breakfast.

“We are plant people who never thought of becoming architects, until Taroudant,” Maurières says. The complicity between habitat and landscape in the region convinced him and Ossart they had something to offer. The couple went on to build a second home next to Pahlavi’s in a ritzy “suburb” bristling with olive orchards, located a five-minute bicycle ride from town. The compound was later sold to Ollivier Verra, a Frenchman who transformed it into a six-room hotel, Dar Al Hossoun. A succession of six courtyards planted with Maurières and Ossart’s signature arrangements of aloes, agaves, grasses and cactuses revolves like a cloister around the 15 rectilinear structures with flat roofs. What looks at first like a huge, dry, derelict swimming pool squatted by wild vegetation is in fact a sunken garden filled with bananas and papayas that were carefully chosen to shade tender exotics.

The hotel is a game-changer for Taroudant. La Gazelle d’Or, established in 1961, is no longer a monopoly. Rita Bennis, the Gazelle’s Moroccan owner, grew up in the feudal opulence of Tazi Palace in Rabat and made her “real first money,” she told Le Point, in business with Adnan Khashoggi. If Taroudant was on anyone’s radar before now, it’s because of Bennis, but her world-class hotel’s draconian policies — you need a reservation even to have a drink — have made her a polarizing, even feared figure.

Whatever the squabbles du jour, Roudanis (as residents of Taroudant are called) are one in their attraction to the town’s mystical sense of isolation. And now, with the extraordinary Dar Al Hossoun, and its owner who is committed to giving his guests the full Taroudant experience, the rest of us are invited in on the secret, as long as it lasts.


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