Marrakech

The ochre comes from the soil. When the Almoravids built the first walls in 1062, they used the earth beneath their feet — iron oxide red, baked by a sun that reaches 42°C in July. Every wall built since has matched it. The colour is not a choice. It is a geological fact.

The medina is nine centuries old and still functions as a city. Not a museum of a city, not a reconstruction — an actual place where 300,000 people live, work, worship, and sleep. The confusion most visitors feel is not disorientation. It is the correct response to encountering a logic that was never designed for them.

Jemaa el-Fna, the main square, has been a gathering point since the eleventh century. UNESCO designated its traditions — the storytellers, the water sellers, the Gnawa musicians — as Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2001, the first time the designation was applied to a living space rather than an object. There are now fewer than five traditional storytellers left who perform in classical Arabic. The snake charmers are still there.

The medina divides into quarters that each city resident knows by name and most visitors never learn. The Mouassine neighbourhood, northwest of Jemaa el-Fna, holds the finest private architecture in the city — riads built by merchant families in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many of them now hotels. The mellah, the former Jewish quarter east of the royal palace, is older and less visited. It was established in 1558 and held the largest Jewish population in the Arab world until the mid-twentieth century.

Yves Saint Laurent arrived in 1966 for a party and the city never let him go. He and Pierre Bergé bought Dar el-Hanch before leaving. In 1980, they bought the Majorelle garden — a painter's estate gone to ruin — and restored it over a decade. Saint Laurent's ashes were scattered there in 2008. Bill Willis arrived the same year, 1966, stayed forty-three years, and died in Marrakech in 2009. Matisse came in 1912 for three months and left, but wrote to a friend that "the revelation came to me from the Orient." Some cities work on certain people this way.

The best time to visit is March to May and September to November. In June, July, and August the medina heats to a temperature that makes the narrow alleys feel sealed. In December and January the nights drop to 3°C and the mountains behind the city hold snow. The spring shoulder season is the most forgiving: warm days, cold evenings, the orange blossom still in the air.

Gueliz, the French-built new town to the west, is where Marrakech residents actually eat, shop, and live. The restaurants are better, the prices are lower, and nobody will follow you down the street. The taxi from the medina takes eight minutes.

What most visitors skip: the Saadian Tombs, sealed for two centuries and rediscovered in 1917, hold sixty-six members of the Saadian dynasty in a chamber of carved stucco that took craftsmen twelve years to complete. They are one hundred metres from the Bahia Palace and receive a fraction of the footfall. The Mellah market, just outside the old Jewish quarter, runs Tuesday and Sunday mornings and sells produce to the city's residents. No one will try to take you anywhere.