Calendar of Light
Golden hour, blue hour, prayer times — the photographic and spiritual clock of Morocco
Fajr — dawn prayer — is called when the first light appears on the eastern horizon. In Marrakech, this ranges from approximately 5:00 AM in June to 6:45 AM in December. The pre-dawn light in Morocco has a quality that photographers call blue hour — cool, shadowless, and evenly distributed. The medinas are empty. The air is clean. The colours of tadelakt and zellige glow without the harsh contrast of direct sun.
Sunrise in Morocco is theatrical. The Atlas Mountains catch the first light while the valleys remain in shadow. Marrakech — sitting on the Haouz Plain at 460 metres — receives sunrise light that has already crossed the High Atlas, filtered and softened. The pisé walls of the medina shift from grey to pink to orange in the first twenty minutes.
The midday light is brutal. From 11 AM to 3 PM in summer, the sun is directly overhead. Shadows disappear. Colours bleach. Photographers stop. The medina's narrow streets become the solution — the souks are designed to block this overhead light. The moucharabieh screens, the covered passages, the deep doorways — all are light management technologies.
Golden hour arrives in the late afternoon — the light turns warm, shadows lengthen, and the surfaces of the medina come alive. This is when the famous Marrakech light happens — the one that appears in every travel magazine. It lasts roughly 45 minutes before sunset, depending on the season.
Maghrib — sunset prayer — marks the moment the sun disappears below the horizon. The call to prayer and the last light coincide. In Ramadan, this is the moment of ftour — the breaking of the fast. The city pauses.
The Moroccan calendar is a light calendar. The five daily prayers track the sun's position. The agricultural calendar tracks the seasons. The photographic calendar tracks the quality of light. All three measure the same thing: the angle of the earth relative to its star.
Explore the full interactive module — with prayer time calculations, golden hour tables, and the light calendar mapped month by month — at Dancing with Lions: https://www.dancingwiththelions.com/data/calendar-of-light
Interactive Module
Data and visualisation by Dancing with Lions
