I love Marrakech. Beautiful mosques and palaces, if you go in the streets at the back of the Medina you will find old caravanserails with craftsmen still working leather, and if you walk to the large sunday flea market you are unlikely to find watches but there are black smiths still working from a fire in the ground.
It’s like time travel, back to the era of the caravans.
Many restaurants and hotels are set up in old Riads (palaces arranged around a 4 pilar courtyard and with two stairwells at opposite corners), or in caravanserails: it’s a building with a huge gate to accommodate the entry of camels, the animals were parked in the central courtyard, which is surrounded by rooms at regular intervals, I seem to recall the merchandise could be stored there and there are rooms and dwellings around balconies running along the upper floors.
If you don’t know you just think it’s a big building, but if you do you know you’re at the cross roads of a major trade route between the gold mines of Timbuktu, Cairo, Europe, and the pilgrimage roads leading to Mekka. Or Jerusalem for that matter.
And for good mesure the Jewish quarter has also been entirely rehabed along with its old synagogue.
If you have a fascination for history and old trade routes, you don’t need to go all the way to the silk road where the old markets have been wiped out— it’s all in Marrakech within easy reach, if you can try to find the back streets, get lost in the old market, and indeed ignore the annoying people.
Finally it’s a 3 hour car drive to Essaouira on the sea shore, which has a beach albeit a windy one, and also is a jewel of an old city. Along the way you will probably see goats literally climbing or sitting atop argan trees— a truly baffling sight as there can be several of them.
