Bab Mansour

Moulay Ismail wanted a capital that would humiliate Versailles. He chose Meknes, a provincial town with no particular distinction, and spent fifty years rebuilding it. The centrepiece was this gate, started in 1720 and finished in 1732 — three years after Ismail himself died. His son Moulay Abdallah completed it, though the credit still goes to the father.

The gate is named after the architect, a Christian convert named Mansour el-Aleuj — "Mansour the Renegade." The story goes that when Ismail saw the finished gate, he asked Mansour if he could have done better. Mansour said yes. Ismail had him executed. The story is probably apocryphal — it follows a pattern that appears in Islamic architectural legend from Granada to Isfahan — but it is told in Meknes as fact.

The marble columns flanking the gate were taken from the Roman ruins at Volubilis, 30 kilometres north. Moulay Ismail treated Volubilis as a quarry for his building projects. The Italian marble came from other plundered sources. Recycling imperial ruins into new imperial statements was a deliberate political act, not laziness.

Bab Mansour faces Place el-Hedim, Meknes's main square. You see it the moment you arrive — it dominates the south side of the plaza. There is no entry fee to see the gate itself. The interior is sometimes used for temporary exhibitions.

Place el-Hedim is a good place to sit with a coffee and study the tilework at leisure. The morning light is better for photography — in the afternoon the gate is in shadow. The square itself fills with food stalls and vendors in the evening.

From Bab Mansour, you can walk south into the imperial city — Moulay Ismail's mausoleum, the Heri es-Souani granaries, and the Bassin de l'Agdal are all within a 20-minute walk.