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Since the 11th century, Marrakech has been a market place wedged between mountain and desert, a neutral ground where nomads and traders would meet to exchange goods. This history has made it a city of storytellers, and superstitions, with markets that have outlived empires. Sam Parkes explores the dichotomous Moroccan city, documenting its color, vibrancy and distant panoramas.
BY SAM PARKES | CABANA TRAVEL | 12 SEPTEMBER 2025
I loathe getting lost; and I loathe the recommendation to do so. One of the endlessly repeated clichés you'll hear before visiting Marrakech is to “get lost” in the medina - as though disorientation has a real charm of its own.
But as the name suggests (a derivation from the Arabic slang to ‘cross over’ and to ‘hide’), it’s almost unavoidable. Dark alleyways twist and converge like a series of tangled hosepipes; a path loops back on itself, increasing what was already an agonising choice fourfold. The hotel sign, like a desert mirage, dissolves into ubiquitous hoarding. “It must be down here”, and a narrow corridor tapers to a dead end. No hotel. Whimsy on hold. The romance promised in guidebooks curdles into panic, desert-thirst and a headache.
Western attitudes to North Africa have long oscillated between ignorance, fear and fantasy. Nowhere embodies this tension more than Marrakech. For many, it is the Arabian Nights repackaged, a sort of Disney land of make-believe and tourist kitsch: sunshine, lamp lit alleyways, opulent feasts under moonlight and a shopping bonanza worthy of a Sultan’s splurge: rugs, bags and tagines feverishly stowed into the hand luggage of a budget airline flight. But what repels some, fascinates others with equal intensity.
Marrakech is and always has been, since the 11th century, a market place; a neutral ground wedged between mountain and desert, where nomads and traders from highland tribes would come to exchange goods. It is a city of storytellers, and superstition, and markets that have outlived empires.
The early allure to travellers - the unfamiliar, the grit, the sense of otherness - has in part rubbed smooth into a simulacrum of exoticism and the bland ubiquity of the package holiday. And yet, beneath that polished surface, away from those wide boulevards and characterless hotels, the aberration and sheer vitality bubbles away. That which endures, with undimmed vibrancy and color, is the medina and the theatre of Jemaa el-Fna.
Like Times Square in New York, Jemaa el-Fna comes alive at night. What only a couple of hours ago was a wasteland of long-abandoned tennis courts, gradually lights up like the tented community of a traveling caravanserai; a curious mixture of snake-charmers, henna-tattooists, musicians, magicians, chained monkeys, acrobats, sun-glass touts and fortune-tellers. Mobile kitchens clatter into action - the darkness punctuated by high watt bulbs swinging over rows of long tables - as whirls of barbecue smoke cloud the air with the smell of charred meats and grilled fish.
For all its excitement, Marrakech can overwhelm and exhaust - one must find an oasis within the maelstrom. Rooftop cafes and bars double up as escape routes. Above the tumult of the medina, beneath the striped awning of multiple riads' stylishly recumbent rooftop bars, what felt like being stuck in the barrel of a wave turns instantly to little more than a windswept sea viewed from a lighthouse. At sunset, beneath a distant panorama of snow capped mountains, the city glows in reds, pinks and terracottas.
Aside from the intoxicating hullabaloo, one of the other great and lasting appeals of Marrakech is design and craftsmanship. ‘Moroccan design’ has become global shorthand for artisanal authenticity. Pairing contemporary design with historic craftsmanship, boutique hotels like Riad Rosemary, Riad Mena, The Mellah, Maison Brummell and IZZA, and architecture firms like Studio KO (the team behind the Yves Saint Laurent Museum), weave, with stylish restraint, the 21st century into the 11th.
Outside of the medina, other modes of escape include trips to Farasha Farmhouse, Jnane Rumi or Jnane Tamsna, a day trip to the rustic glamour of Beldi Country Club, or a stay at the effortlessly stylish Berber Lodge or Kasbah Bab Ourika. Or, ideally, to the Atlas Mountains. A 90-minute drive leads to Imlil, gateway to the High Atlas. The contrast is startling. The hot, choked atmosphere of the city evaporates into cool, clean, glacial air. Abode-style homes of remote Berber villages cling to mountain sides like Martin’s nests and distant green valleys thin into blue sky.
Even a simple trek here, without scaling Mount Toubkal, offers grandeur enough: at the top of a road that spirals to a point like a cinnamon roll, a simple shack serves instant coffee and mint tea, accompanied by a plate of sugar heaped in hard edged white blocks like a cubist sketch, and rusks of sweet, stale bread. Luxury is always a relative value, but after an exhausting climb- perched on the edge of a cliff with what must be one of the finest views of an any cafe in the world- this is luxury.
Still further up, a 360-degree panorama - jagged mountains to one side and the blank scroll of Sahara desert to the other - rolls on and on to infinity. What feels like sidereal time at these heights descends with a celestial hush, the deep silence punctuated only by the the call to prayer and the primordial peal of a high flying bird, which ricochets around the valley like gunshot.
Amid the immensity of the Atlas Mountains, the frenetic pulse of Marrakech has ebbed away like a receding tide. The scales have tipped considerably in the direction of peace and equanimity. After a blissful few days, the return to the city’s rumpus provides the counterweight to what is a perfectly balanced trip.
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