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An eagle’s nest of a place, high in the mountains, Telouet is something of a legend. It has one of the most spectacular kasbahs in the Atlas, megalomaniac and decaying. The bloodstained history of the dynasty which built it is recounted in Gavin Maxwell’s Lords of the Atlas . Today, Telouet with its flocks of parked four-wheel drive vehicles is for tourists. Within living memory, however, the village’s name was synonymous with the repressive rule of the Glaoui brothers. Interesting though Telouet is, it probably comes number three on the excursions from Marrakech list, after Tin Mal and Ouirgane, and Asni/Imlil/Aremd. However, easily accessible, it is still one of the great sites of mountain Morocco and an extraordinary display of quasi-medieval power created in the 20th century. The effect is not dissimilar to mock lairdish castles in the Scottish Highlands.
It is possible to do Marrakech to Telouet and back on a very rapid half- day excursion using your own transport. Otherwise, there are slow buses from Bab Aghmat daily at 1500 and 1900, while the Telouet to Marrakech service departs 0700 and 1100. Souk day is Thursday, so there are more taxis on that day. In your own car or, better still, 4WD with an experienced local driver, you will cover much, much more.
Visiting Telouet
As visitors are frequent, the uniformed gardien is programmed to emerge to the roar of a Toyota 4WD. There is no heritage foundation to look after Telouet – tip the ‘warden’ 20dh a head after your visit.
Bloodthirsty and short is the history of Telouet and its kasbah. This is a tale of chance and cunning, of how two brothers of an Atlas tribe, sons of an Ethiopian slave woman, by force of arms and character, came to rule over much of southern Morocco in the early 20th century. As it is a story in which neither of the main players, French and Moroccan, appear in a glorious light, contemporary historians have preferred to leave the main episodes alone. These were turbulent times in Marrakech and the mountains as first the Moroccan monarchy and then the French skirmished with the southern tribal leaders to achieve dominance. The dénouement, which came shortly after Moroccan independence in 1956, was fatal to Glaoui power.
Surprisingly perhaps, there are almost no eyewitness accounts of Telouet at the height of Glaoui power. None of the former inhabitants have written on their home and no doubt the foreign writers and intellectuals of the 1930s were too preoccupied with Marrakech to make it up to the mountains. Gavin Maxwell gives a short description of the fortress gripped by winter, just after a great blizzard which left thousands of goats suffocated on the mountainsides. As the snow melted, ravens, crows and kites gorged themselves on the carcasses. At sundown, “the air was dark with them as with a swarm of locusts; they homed for Telouet in their thousands, …till the branches of the trees broke under them, till the battlements of the castle were foul with their excreta”.
Abandoned before completion, the Kasbah of Telouet as we see it today is the result of 20th-century building schemes implemented by T’hami, the second great Glaoui chief. Once through the wooden wicket gate, you’ll be shown up staircases and along corridors where sand storms have turned the plaster a dusty pink. Entering the state apartments, you pass under a photograph of the late Hassan II, kitted out in shades and white hooded robe. (Perhaps the Alaouites always get the last word – Hassan II’s father, Mohammed V, was the victim of Glaoui plotting with the French in the early 1950s.) The great reception rooms are still splendid with their cedar ceilings and crumbling stucco, perfect transposition of late 19th-century Moroccan urban taste to the mountains. Imagine a log fire and flunkeys flitting among clubbish leather armchairs.
A visit to Telouet concludes with a clamber up to the roof. Keep tight hold of the kids, as there are plenty of unsafe drops and skylights are empty holes where glass should be. Steel T-beams dangle into the emptiness where ceilings have collapsed, fissured adobe walls lean inwards. From these terraces, you can get an idea of the size of ‘the labyrinth at whose heart one might expect the minotaur’, to quote a visitor during the palace’s heyday. Look out for the silk-weave panels above the zelige in the room on your right as you enter the inner ‘state’ patio.
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