Morocco Guide
Marrakesh
Marrakesh – "Morocco City", as early foreign travellers called it – has always been something of a pleasure city, a marketplace where the southern tribesmen and Berber villagers bring in their goods, spend their money and find entertainment. For visitors it's an enduring fantasy – a city of immense beauty, low, red and tent-like before a great shaft of mountains – and immediately exciting. It's known as the Red City from the natural red-ochre pigment that bedecks its walls and buildings, but there's certainly no shortage of other colours.
At the heart of it all is a square, Djemaa el Fna, really no more than an open space in the centre of the city, but the stage for a long-established ritual in which shifting circles of onlookers gather round groups of acrobats, drummers, pipe musicians, dancers, storytellers, comedians and fairground acts. However many times you return there, it remains compelling. So, too, do the city's architectural attractions: the immense, still basins of the Agdal and Menara gardens, the delicate Granada-style carving of the Saadian Tombs and, above all, the Koutoubia Minaret, the most perfect Islamic monument in North Africa.
Like all Moroccan cities, Marrakesh is a town of two halves: the ancient walled Medina, founded by Sultan Youssef Ben Tachfine in the Middle Ages, and the colonial Ville Nouvelle, built by the French in the mid-twentieth century. Each has its own delights – the Medina with its ancient palaces and mansions, labyrinthine souks and deeply traditional way of life, and the Ville Nouvelle with its pavement cafés, trendy boutiques, gardens and boulevards.
Highlights
1 Djemaa el Fna The most wonderful city square in the world, an open-air circus of snake charmers, acrobats, musicians and storytellers.
2 Koutoubia Mosque The most perfect minaret in North Africa, simple but beautifully proportioned, and a classic piece of Almohad architecture.
3 Almoravid Koubba This tiny ablutions kiosk is the last remnant of the original city, and the only intact Almoravid building in Morocco.
4 Ben Youssef Medersa Stucco, zellij tilework, and carved cedarwood mark this beautiful medersa.
5 El Badi Palace The "Incomparable Palace", now an incomparable ruin.
6 Bahia Palace The ideal of Arabic domestic architecture expressed in a nineteenth-century politician's mansion.
7 Majorelle Garden A sublime garden, with cacti, lily ponds, and an Islamic Arts museum housed in a stunning pavilion.
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