At a Glance Marrakech Travel Guides | Marrakech | Trip Planner | At a Glance Marrakech

Visitors to Marrakech inevitably converge on the médina, a labyrinth of narrow streets and alleyways. The epicentre, Jemaâ el Fna or ‘la Place’ is a uniquely irregular urban space for varied and bizarre entertainments. Here beats the médina’s heart, pulsating late into the night with singers and snake-charmers, knaves and drummers, tinkerly acrobats and tattoo artists. Now designated a World Heritage Site, witness to the ancient arts of storytelling, Jemaâ el Fna has survived the developers’ designs to become the city’s symbol – along with the nearby minaret of the Koutoubia Mosque. Kids will be entranced by the pick-n-mix universe of characters at loose across the square.

Once a caravan city, Marrakech still has great commercial prowess, as the mass conversion of old riads into profitable exotic holiday retreats reveals. Today, the covered market streets north of Jemaâ el Fna are devoted to satisfying visitors’ desires for leather slippers and dates, wrought iron mirror frames and brass bibelots. Foreign arty types have also brought a welcome contemporary twist to the craft tradition. Where the souks run out, more sights await the culturally minded: the Musée de Marrakech and the largest Islamic college in Morocco, the Medersa Ben Youssef, high-point of the city’s decorative arts. Nearby is Marrakech’s oldest building, the blocky Almoravid Koubba. A wander in this part of the city naturally leads eastward to the pungent tanneries, where leather is still made to ancestral recipes. Also in the maze of dusty alleys north of the square are palaces for the best Moroccan nosh.

Real tourists make an early start to do the area south of Jemaâ el Fna. Here are the serious sites: craft collections in patio palaces, the tombs of the 16th-century Saâdians – the most bijou royal mausoleum in Islam? You might even locate a semi-abandoned synagogue, witness to a time before base homeland politics destroyed religious co-existence. A long hike will take you down to the Agdal gardens through neighbourhoods of pink-washed walls and hole-in-the-wall shops. From rambling nests atop ramparts, storks flap off to pick through the city rubbish dumps, a horse- drawn calèche squeezes down a side-street.

There are no real must-see sites in Guéliz, once Marrakech’s ville nouvelle, reached from the médina by the first tree-planted boulevard outside the city walls, Avenue Mohammed V. Guéliz is a place where until recently low-key luxury met provincial Morocco. However, new concrete blocks, tourist coaches and a McDonald’s have knocked the edge off the 1930s elegance. Still, ladies who lunch promenade their pooches on quiet streets under the orange trees, (fairly) respectable gents sup a beer at the Café Atlas, and local youths on vespas screech up to the Colisée to take in a film. For the visitor, Guéliz is where you find restaurants with airs and graces, pizzas and pasta joints, and bars seedier than a rotting watermelon.

South of Guéliz, the Hivernage is a showcase of colonial planning, a garden city for winter residence. On curving suburban streets, hidden in greenery, hotels sit next to modernist villas. In the shade of a well-groomed hedge, machine-gun toting soldiers indicate a royal in residence. Cutting across the Hivernage, the link between Guéliz and the projected Oliveraie hotel zone, the Avenue de France will be Marrakech’s Champs Elysées. Here sits the squat red mass of the Palais des Congrès, home to many an international incentive seminar. Jauntier and closer to Guéliz is the Théâtre Royal, all domes and Pharaonic detailing. Could it bring that longed-for gust of cultural energy? For the moment, the annual artsy ciné fest at the Colisée and the outdoor theatre of the Institut français are focal points of Marrakech’s artistic life.

North and east of the city is hedonists’ Marrakech, the Palmeraie. In the 1970s, this was still – just about – the city’s lung, a place where market gardens glowed green under the dusty date palms. Drought and the decay of traditional irrigation blighted the area – until bright sparks realized that this was prime development land. Today, high walls and building sites among the palms show that ready cash is being ploughed into conspicuous consumption such as that seen in both European and Moroccan deco-mags. Never have the city’s craft builders been busier.

Antidote to Red City summers are the cool valleys of the Atlas mountains, a 90-minute drive away. Though often swathed in heat-haze, the ever snow-capped backdrop of the tourist brochures merits a side-trip. With four-wheel drive vehicles visitors can reach isolated adobe villages once accessible only to mules and walkers. In a remote valley, the roofless grandeur of the mosque of Tin Mal testifies to a vanished dynasty’s power. In the Ouarzazate direction – and still within day-trip distance – is another striking high pass, the Tizi-n-Tichka, and the village of Telouet where a pacha’s palace, all Berber-baronial splendour, crumbles back into earth.

Marrakech has ocean boltholes as well as mountain hideaways. One- time hippy destination, rediscovered by Paris intellectuals in the 1980s, Essaouira became a happening spot in the late 1990s and now has an airport to prove it. Here the surf-bums play footie with the locals and ecological retreats are opening in the countryside. Further north, phosphate port Safi, famed for craft pottery, is far too rough for gentrifiers and oyster town Oualidia, somnolent outside summer, struggles to maintain a reputation as Marrakech’s St Tropez. Thankfully, things have not reached such a pass.

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