Marrakesh - "Morocco City", as early travelers called it - has always been something of a pleasure city, a marketplace where the southern tribesmen and Berber villagers bring in their goods, spend their money and find entertainment. For visitors it's an enduring fantasy - a city of immense beauty, low, red and tentlike before a great shaft of mountains - and immediately exciting. At the heart of it all is a square, Djemaa El Fna, really no more than an open space in the centre of the city, but the stage for a long-established ritual in which shifting circles of onlookers gather round groups of acrobats, drummers, pipe musicians, dancers, storytellers, comedians and fairground acts. However many times you return there, it remains compelling. So, too, do the city's architectural attractions: the immense, still basins of the Agdal and Menara gardens, the delicate Granada-style carving of the Saadian Tombs and, above all, the Koutoubia Minaret, the most perfect Islamic monument in North Africa.
Unlike Fes, for so long its rival as the nation's capital, the city seems much more rooted in the present than the past. After Casablanca, Marrakesh is Morocco's second largest city and its population continues to rise. It has a thriving industrial area and is the most important market and administrative centre of southern Morocco. This is not to suggest an easy prosperity - there is heavy unemployment and poverty here, as throughout the country - but a stay in Marrakesh leaves you with a vivid impression of life and activity. And for once this doesn't apply exclusively to the new city, Gueliz; the Medina , substantially in ruins at the beginning of the twentieth century, was rebuilt and expanded during the years of French rule and retains no less significant a role in the modern city.
Marrakesh has Berber rather than Arab origins, having developed as the metropolis of Atlas tribes - Maghrebis from the plains, Saharan nomads and former slaves from Africa beyond the desert, Sudan, Senegal and the ancient kingdom of Timbuktu. All of these strands shaped the city's souks and its way of life, and in the crowds and performers in Djemaa El Fna, they can still occasionally seem distinct.
For most travelers, Marrakesh is the first experience of the south and its generally more laid-back atmosphere and attitudes. Marrakchis are renowned for their warmth and sociability, their humor and directness and there seems a greater openness too, with women enjoying a more public presence, often riding mopeds around on the streets. And even at its heart, Marrakesh feels more like a conglomeration of villages than an urban community, with quarters formed and maintained by successive generations of migrants from the countryside. |
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