Dar El Bacha Museum

Dar el Bacha, the house of the pasha, stands on the street that carries its name, between Bab Doukkala and the Mouassine quarter. It was built in 1910 as the Marrakech residence of Thami el Glaoui, whom the sultan made pasha of the city in 1912 and who ran the Moroccan south for four decades. Behind plain outer walls it worked as a small court: a monumental entrance hall opening onto a tiled courtyard with a central fountain, then arched passages to smaller courts at different levels, each with its own light. Carved plaster, painted cedar ceilings, zellij floors of varying design and mashrabiyya screens accumulate room by room without repeating. The guest list says what the place was for. Churchill came, and Charlie Chaplin, Colette, Maurice Ravel, Josephine Baker. The end came quickly: el Glaoui took a leading part in the French deposition of Sultan Mohammed V in 1953, a thing Moroccans did not forgive, and when the sultan returned he submitted publicly. He died in January 1956, the palace was seized by the state, and it stayed shut for some sixty years. It reopened in 2017 as the Musée des Confluences, showing Moroccan decorative arts and ethnographic objects, ceramics, textiles, jewellery, manuscripts, in rooms where the building remains the main exhibit. The Bacha Coffee house has occupied part of the same courtyard since 2019, with its own entrance. Come early: the morning light crosses the main courtyard at an angle that shifts the colour of the tilework as you watch.