Le jardin de la Ménara

The Ménara garden sits at the western edge of the city, a vast olive grove laid out in 1157 by the Almohad caliph Abd al-Mu'min and maintained, with varying degrees of care, ever since. The enclosure runs to some ninety-six hectares. The trees are old enough to be massive, their trunks gnarled to the diameter of small rooms, and the grove stretches far enough that the city noise, audible at the entrance, fades to nothing after a few minutes of walking. At the centre is a rectangular basin, two hundred metres by a hundred and fifty, fed by an underground network of channels that still runs from the Atlas foothills. The pavilion at its edge is later: the Alaouite sultan Mohammed IV built it over the ruins of a Saadian one, and the inscription above the terrace door gives the year 1869-70. Its green-tiled roof sits in the reflection, and behind it, on clear days, the snow on the High Atlas closes the view in a way no postcard has quite managed. Families come in the afternoons, particularly at weekends, to sit along the water's edge or walk the olive paths under the canopy. The Ménara is the opposite of the curated, architecturally intense spaces of the Medina: large, unpretentious, quietly ancient. Water still arrives at the pool from below ground, sustaining the trees and the basin in a climate where evaporation never stops.