Marrakech by Miranda Innes
Marvellous, Mysterious Marrakech
Written for Morocco Gateway by travel and culture writer Miranda Innes
Approaching Marrakech from the air, you first see a horizon of baked and dusty cinnamon-brown desert. Once on the ground the sound of water animates Marrakech. Water, trickling through ancient conduits from the Atlas Mountains, and splashed around with profligate abandon in a city that gets around a third of London’s rainfall. The road from the airport, lined with rose and palm, plumbago and bougainvillea, is always busy with young men trailing lengths of hosepipe and creating rainbows as they flood the newly planted green route. Every riad secreted behind its heavy cedar doors has a bouquet of jasmine, pomegranate and citrus plants growing lush and fragrant within its courtyard, generously watered daily. Wherever you look, fountains and rills arc and sparkle.
The thousand-year-old city, constructed like an interconnecting Lego warren from mud and wooden beams, has a daily life as exotic as any fantasy. Within the ramparts of this UNESCO world heritage site, little has changed in the last thousand years – the slave market disappeared a century back, but the magic souk still dispenses love potions, spells and dried hedgehogs to bring good fortune to your home, in a typically canny combination of witchcraft and recycled roadkill. People still go to prison for casting successful spells, though, almost regretfully, Sidi Ramadi’s mate the police chief claimed that, as young people no longer believed in magic, it no longer wielded its erstwhile power.
A walk through the crowded Derbs is a flicker of blinding sunshine and inky shade, as you pass through roofed tunnels and latticed bamboo into broad daylight. Everywhere people are selling things, in a wild kaleidoscope of colour, comprising spices, jewels, leather, carpets, sequinned belly dancing outfits, terracotta charcoal barbecues and a million other curiosities. The souks take you back to a world before the industrial revolution; they are the antidote to the predictable world of mass-produced and machine-made. Everything here is hammered, woven, dyed or wrought by hand, usually in the maze of little workshops behind the winding kissaria of covered booths.
Any twitch of interest will land the unwary in a bargaining whirlwind involving mint tea, tales of starving children, outrageous prices and a general air of being on the hysterical edge of a precipice. The thing is to keep your cool having already decided what you like and how much it is worth to you. You can check out sane prices in the government controlled shops so that you have a ballpark figure, and then be prepared to simply walk away. Easily said, but I have paid twice a likely London price for a pair of magenta leather shoes that did not make it to Djemaa el Fna before the upper parted company from its sole. Thus will you very likely become entangled.
Marrakchis are also the most generous people you could come across. They will give you the shirt off their back, they will expend every effort to make you comfortable, force feeding you with the very best morsels from the communal platter, they will spend hours, days trying to help you with some bureaucratic glitsch. Among the other foreign visitors dining under the stars in Djemaa el Fna, you will find mavericks and misfits, pilgrims, adventurers and sunstarved Norwegians who speak 14 Berber dialects. They are a large part of Morocco’s fascination.
Marrakech is a fascinating and mysterious city at a multitude of different levels, a city of contrasts, shot through with glints of the incredible, another world, less than four hours from home.
About Miranda Innes
Miranda Innes is a well-known travel and culture writer. Her book Cinnamon City recounts her unique experience of renovating a riad in Marrakech. Cinnamon City can be purchased here. With her partner Dan Pearce, a painter and cartoonist, Miranda runs yoga and painting breaks from their Marrakech riad, Riad Maizie. More details can be found here.