Atlas Mountains

The ochre-coloured city of Marrakech is, alongside Agadir, Morocco’s biggest draw card. Founded almost 1000 years ago, it is one of the great cities of the Maghreb and is home to its most perfect Islamic monu ment, the Koutoubia Mosque.

Marrakesh is above all a city of drama. Its spectacular setting against the snow capped High Atlas mountains lingers long in the mind of most travellers, and the famous Djemaa el-Fna square provides perhaps the greatest open-air spectacle in the world. There’s plenty of entertainment to be found in the medina too, where travellers can drift with the smells and sounds of the souks, haggle passionately for car pets, or dine in some of the best and most extravagant restaurants in the country.

The city is also blessed with an location. Just one hour away from the heat and the crowds of the city, you can be strolling through the Atlas of the Ourika Valley, or striking off into the wilder territory around Mount Toubkal, barely visited except by the animals and their Berber shepherds.

Valleys cut through the range and spill out south and east towards the Sahara. Dot ted with red-coloured kasbahs, riotous palm groves and largely unremarkable towns, the spectacular natural settings exemplify the maxim that ‘it is better to travel than to ar rive’. The best time to visit is undoubtedly early spring. If you can, avoid Marrakesh during the months of July and August.

Marrakesh

Basking in the clear African light of the south, Marrakesh has an entirely different feel from its sister cities further north. It is unmistakably more African than cos mopolitan Casablanca, more Moroccan

than sanitised Rabat, and more Berber than the proud, aloof and intensely Arab city of Fès.

With a population of around 1.5 million, Marrakesh is Morocco’s fourth-largest city. To a certain degree, it serves as a second Rabat, a kind of capital of the south, and at tracts merchants and traders from all over the surrounding plains, the High Atlas and the Sahara.

It’s positioned on an important cross roads linking the south to the north, and the west to the east. It’s also the southernmost terminus of the train network.

Just as the colour blue is synonymous with the city of Fès, green with Meknès and white with Rabat, so red has become the colour of Marrakesh. Red earth walls sur round the medina of flat-roofed red houses. A local Berber legend has it that when the Koutoubia was planted in the city’s heart, it poured so much blood that all the walls, all the houses and all the roads turned this colour. At dusk, in the last rays of the setting sun, the walls of the city turn almost crimson. Don’t miss it.