Marrakech is jarring, a shock. Most fabled destinations upset our habitual perception in some way, which is why we love them. The lonesome elegance of Paris brings on a nagging doubt that you’ve ever really known romance; the rot of history in Rome leads to musings on your own mortality. Marrakech unnerves by flooding the senses and then soothes with the freedom of instinct. Nothing is so known about this place as to prevent us from appreciating the chaos at face value. You spot something—a mosaic, a carpet, a carved wooden doorway—and love it simply because it is beautiful. For all you can tell, the flowing Arabic script on the plate you’ve just purchased says “employees must wash hands before returning to work.” Such an escape from educated appreciation comes as a relief.
But first you must yield to the chaos. And there is no place more disorienting than the place Djemaa el Fna, the great square where all the nerve endings of this ancient city come together. At dusk, the air is heavy with the scent of dung and diesel and the perfume of orange blossoms. Men squat in rapt attention to the incantations of storytellers; horse-drawn carriages plow through the square, already bisected by a noisy parade of taxis, motor scooters, buses, and vans. There is no empty space in which to stand still for more than a moment.
Surprised by a flash of veiled green eyes, I narrowly miss a donkey pulling a cartload of coriander. I step aside and accidentally jostle a snake charmer, who thrusts his cobra at me (at least I think it was a cobra). I cross the street and follow a neon-lit staircase to a second-story terrace café. From here, I can survey the frenetic scene from a comfortable distance.
On the horizon, the snowy peaks of the Atlas Mountains turn indigo in the tawny light spreading across the landscape of palm trees and hundreds of white satellite dishes, the latter sprouting from flat roofs like mushrooms. As the sun sets, more and more people spill into the square. Strings of white lights illuminate a hundred food stalls where meat sizzles on braziers. Dark-eyed adolescents giggle at khaki-clad tourists; would-be guides tug at their sleeves. Pairs of soldiers strut through the crowd, backpackers thumb guidebooks under streetlights, and a self-consciously elegant American couple, dressed in crisply ironed linen, stride by on their way to dinner.
Tension between tourists and international tastemakers is yet another flash point in this tightly wired city. The French visit Morocco the way Americans go to Florida—it’s only a two-and-a-half-hour flight—and they feel a proprietary satisfaction in the fact that theirs is the country’s second language. The foreign elite may dote on the delicate, honeycomb carvings of the Saadien Tombs and the 16th-century mausoleums that are among Marrakech’s most famous sites, but thousands of others swarm in for a cheap sun holiday set against an exotic backdrop, quickly vanishing into the bunkerlike hotels outside of town. Marrakech, like Capri, has a spectacular ability to absorb all comers into the landscape. Yet I suspect that ordinary tourists love Marrakech for more or less the same reasons as the head of Hermès, Jean-Louis Dumas, who has a house in the Palmeraie; or Bernard-Henri Levi, France’s best-known philosopher, and his actress wife, Arielle Dombasle; or any of the other glamorous types who stay in the stylish small hotels that have opened in the Medina. They come to Marrakech to take in the languid rhythms of a culture that is teetering on the cusp of irrevocable modernity but has yet to buy the required assumption that time means money.
Before 1912, when Morocco became a French protectorate and transportation improved, few Europeans had visited Marrakech. In 1922 the painter Jacques Majorelle, who was suffering from tuberculosis, came to Marrakech for its healthful climate. His boldly colored canvases became cult items in Paris, serving almost as tourism posters. In the same year, La Mamounia opened. The sumptuous hotel, a lavish hybrid of Art Deco and Arabic motifs, became a destination in itself, and Marrakech slowly found its way onto the itineraries of wealthy but venture some souls with a taste for the exotic.
During the Sixties, of course, the city became a magnet for the counterculture, not least because Morocco was a major producer of hashish. In the decade that followed, Yves Saint-Laurent bought Majorelle’s villa and helped to restore a little of the city’s glamour. But by the Eighties, the hotel boom on the edges of town had tipped the delicate equilibrium between locals and tourists: Marrakech became overbuilt; shopkeepers, aggressive.
Then, in 1994, a stern force of tourist police spread the word during the GATT trade talks that foreigners were not to be hassled. Europeans and a few Americans trickled back into town, and some started buying riads, the old Medina houses with interior courtyards. Now people from all over the world scramble to buy riads in the walled city, the same ones who went to Figueres in Spain in the Fifties or Provence in the Sixties.
Today, when you arrive in Marrakech, Mohammed VI—a natty-looking fellow in a rakish white suit that could pass for formal dress in Monte Carlo—is there to greet you: His portrait is all over the airport, adding some chic to a terminal that looks more like a high school auditorium. The Moroccans affectionately call their young king “M6,” which also happens to be the name of a French TV station that’s a Gallic version of MTV. His liberal policies, including an interest in the rights of women, are among the reasons why Morocco, and Marrakech in particular, has once again become popular.
But your duties as a traveler in Marrakech are still wonderfully light. You’ll see the Koutoubia Mosque—tiresomely referred to as Marrakech’s Eiffel Tower or Empire State Building—every day on your way into town. It’s beautifully lit but closed to non-Muslims. The only other things worth braving the heat of the day for are the aforementioned Saadien Tombs, the souks, and perhaps La Bahia Palace.
And so, instead of sightseeing, you slow down and start to notice things—the powdery scent of fig leaves bruised by the desert heat, the slick green olive-oil soap sold by the scoop from big vats all over town, the vivid pyramids of loose spices in the market, the melancholy call to prayer from a neighborhood mosque, and the undertone of lust in a country where virginity is prized and half the population is currently under 20. Like a photo slowly developing, it is the contrast and tension between the unseen and the observed that finally creates your personal picture of Marrakech.
To really savor Marrakech, you must stay somewhere that has a garden and is an easy walk into town. Behind closed doors, perhaps on a terrace of your own, you’ll listen to the doves cooing in the morning and the starlings chattering at sunset. You’ll spend unmeasured hours on a chaise reading and dozing. The rhythms of life follow the heat of the day, so you rise early to wander, retreat from the sun at noon, lunch, rest in the afternoon when shade and silence are the city’s priorities, and then join in its explosive nocturnal life after sundown.
It’s easy to find your way around and easy to get lost. The ramparts of orange-colored earth pierced by peacock-tail gates, each called a bab, are the skin of the Medina. If this city within a city seems a random labyrinth of alleys and lanes, it is on the most basic level a maze, which is to say that the only way to learn your way around is to make the same mistake so many times you couldn’t possibly make it again. Since few travelers to Marrakech are here long enough to attain this subconscious level of familiarity, the city will remain ever mystifying, a situation that is heightened by the lack of street signs.
The souks—the warren of alleys, lanes, shops, and ateliers that make up the market—lie buried in the middle of the Medina. The cleanest activities—selling books and gold or making silver jewelry—are at the center of the souks, while the dirtier jobs—tanning and trading leather—are on the edges. And everywhere food is being prepared. At the end of a lane near the Bab Agnaou, an old woman grates carrots in the early morning while two others sit at a table making olive-size meatballs from a bowl of kefta: ground mutton mixed with rice and seasoned with cumin, cinnamon, fresh mint leaves, parsley, onion, and coriander. Suddenly aware that they have an audience, the women grin; one of them quickly flicks a curtain so their work can again be anonymous.
The Moroccan kitchen, one of the most refined in the world, has traditionally been the preserve of women, and recipes are transmitted from generation to generation as a sort of culinary dowry. Although the mass-prepared couscous and tagines that have become the tourist idiom are often heavy, reflecting their origins as high-caloric meals once meant to sustain laborers in the fields, the food most Moroccans eat at home is remarkably delicate. One of the glories of the Moroccan table is the wonderful array of salads and appetizers that precede the main course, sometimes spinach cooked with paprika, cumin, preserved lemons, and pepper; or briouat, a fragile, flaky turnover filled with meat, cheese, fish, or sausage, sweet tomato relish, and grated carrots with sultanas, those yellow raisins I kept finding stuck to my heels.
These sorts of preparations are time-consuming, which is why they are seldom found in restaurants. But things are changing. A new generation of professional cooks, including a growing number of male chefs, are codifying the country’s culinary heritage at the same time that increased professional opportunities for women are freeing them from the kitchen. The assumption that most menus offer the same standard dishes is much less true these days.
What remains unchanged is Marrakech’s thriving café culture, one of the best legacies of the French. A terrace with ceiling fans in the arcades of the Gueliz district, the 1920s French-designed new town, is perfect for waiting out the heat of the day with a drink and a book.
“Voulez-vous goûter le rafraîchissement local?” asks the waiter when I settle in at the Café Les Négociants. I expect mint tea. But a minute later he returns with a bright orange bottle of Fanta and a big grin. A fine joke—who could resist needling a tourist now and then?—and a telling bit of irony. Everyone else on the shaded terrace is drinking Fanta, too.