Marrakech

A good part of the Marrakech that visitors now photograph was put together by foreigners who came for a season and stayed: a French painter who patented his own shade of blue, an American decorator named Bill Willis, a couturier whose ashes were scattered in the painter's garden. The medina's best rooms are still behind unmarked doors, and several of them are only found with help.

Stay

Institutions

La Mamounia (Bab Jdid) — The garden was an eighteenth-century gift from Sultan Mohammed ben Abdallah to his son Moulay Mamoun. Henri Prost and Antoine Marchisio built the hotel on it from 1923, and it opened in 1929. Churchill came to paint, Hitchcock filmed The Man Who Knew Too Much here in 1956, and Jacques Garcia redid it in 2009.

Newer Arrivals

El Fenn (Medina) — Vanessa Branson and Howell James opened it in 2004 with six bedrooms. It now runs to 41 rooms across thirteen connected buildings, hung with contemporary Moroccan and African art, and in November 2025 passed to the Benabbés-Taarji family.