One word, three trips: a stone plateau under the Atlas you can reach by dinner, the first low dunes at the end of the Draa valley, and the sand sea of Erg Chebbi three days away. How far each one is, how to get there and how long it takes.
In Marrakech the best rooms for a drink belong to the hotels, and each of them stands for a different idea of luxury: boutique and design-led, historical grandeur, exclusive perfection, monumental serenity. Eleven addresses, and the three we would choose ourselves.
Bill Willis called his medina house Dar Noujoum, the house of stars. The rooftop restaurant that took the name serves monkfish tagine and saffron mayonnaise under Salgado photographs, seven riads above the old city, and it is open to anyone who books.
When to come, where to sleep, how the medina works on foot, and what most visitors get wrong about Marrakech: the things worth knowing before a first trip.
MapTwenty-four festive restaurants in Marrakech, ordered by how loud the evening gets: from the dining rooms where a double bass plays in the corner to the courtyards where fire and aerialists run past midnight, and the rooms where the DJ takes over and nobody sits back down.
A blind wall six metres high, no windows, a door that could belong to a storeroom. Then the ceiling opens and there is a garden. What a riad actually is, and the questions worth asking before you book one.
A hammam that predates tourism, eight golf courses that play through the winter, a riad that turns its back on the street and an art fair that takes La Mamounia for four days in February. Nine versions of Marrakech, and what each one asks of you.
September brings Marrakech back to life after summer. October delivers the payoff: clear Atlas views, a full cultural calendar, and the country's most persuasive argument for staying longer than planned.
MapAbove the labyrinthine medina, Marrakech has developed a rooftop circuit of real depth: restaurants where the city's architecture frames the meal, cocktail terraces built around the evening light and the Atlas horizon, and pools where the altitude makes the setting worthwhile.
A clay urn left in the embers of a bathhouse furnace, a bowl of couscous that appears only on Fridays, snails simmered in a broth no vendor will explain. Sixteen dishes, and the customs that put each of them on the table.
A fortress built for foreign traders in 1764 became, two centuries on, the Moroccan town where painters, musicians and kitesurfers actually stayed: wind, ramparts and blue boats included.
A restored rabbi's house in the Kasbah holds seven thousand objects of adornment from across the world, three thousand of them on show, opening with a horse named Mansour. Le MAP is Marrakech's quietest argument that jewelry is a form of history.