The Minaret Built Twice

The first Koutoubia was wrong.

The Almohads conquered Marrakech in 1147 and immediately began building their great mosque on the ruins of the Almoravid palace. The engineers laid out the prayer hall, oriented the mihrab toward Mecca, and raised the walls. Then someone checked the alignment.

It was off. Not by much — but enough to matter. A mosque's mihrab must point to Mecca. This one pointed somewhere else.

They could have adjusted. They could have explained. Instead, they did something characteristic of a dynasty that thought in centuries: they demolished the mosque and built it again, slightly rotated, on the correct axis. The original foundations are still there, visible in the archaeological traces beside the current building. Two mosques, overlapping, one correct and one erased.

The minaret they raised got it right.

The Koutoubia tower — 77 meters tall, visible from everywhere in Marrakech — became the prototype. Its proportions (1:5, width to height) were copied at the Hassan Tower in Rabat and the Giralda in Seville. When the Spanish reconquered Andalusia, they didn't demolish the Giralda; they added a bell tower to the Almohad minaret. The template survived conquest.

The name "Koutoubia" means "Mosque of the Booksellers" — the souks around it once specialized in manuscripts. The booksellers are gone, replaced by tourist shops. But the minaret remains, mathematically perfect, aligned with a city 4,000 kilometers away, built twice because once wasn't good enough.

At night, three bronze spheres at the tower's peak catch the light. Legend says they're solid gold. They're not — but the story persists. In Marrakech, even the architecture has gossip.