DE IBIZA A MARRAKECH
The 1001 sides of Marrakech
There are places like Ibiza that look at us from multiple sides. One of them is the city of Marrakech, an amalgamation of people, cultures and continuous contrasts between the modern and the ancient, between a present that moves clumsily towards the future or a tradition that impregnates everything with the color and smell of the desert and Africa.
Photography by @dosmares_ibiza
Text by Daniel Foraster
Jemaa el Fna Square, the Medina and the Casbah:
Jemma el Fna Square is the heart and soul of the city. It is the first visit that must be made and a blow to the senses, a confusion of sensations to which it is not possible to get used to, flutes, drums, shouts, chants, different languages and multiple entanglements, smiles, fusses and some surly sidelong glances. An overflowing hustle and bustle located in a huge old and somewhat dirty setting, but no less captivating.
There is the Café de France, a place where Juan Goytisolo used to go at dusk and where it is possible, from one of its terraces, to find the essential rest to try to put order to so many impressions.
From the square you can access the Medina and the Casbah, an endless number of ramshackle alleys where the present narrows as you go and you discover, in the stalls that crowd them to the right and left, an old Berber bracelet, cups, glasses or handmade plates, rugs, cushions, sandals, slippers and countless more or less imaginable things.
There we will find the Café des Epices, located in the famous Plaza de las Especies, a restaurant with an upper terrace from which you can see the entire Medina; the Nomad restaurant with Moroccan cuisine; La Famille, a beautiful outdoor multi-cuisine restaurant; and the Jardin Secret, a garden where you can rest from the exhausting coming and going through these neighborhoods.
Gueliz:
It is the most modern neighborhood in the city, the one that is the closest to the Western lifestyle, where the new generation of artists resides and where numerous art galleries and boutiques of obvious Parisian inspiration, cafes, centers commercial, such as Le Carre Eden, local businesses, others oriented to tourism, organic food stores and also the typical fast food restaurants and clothing stores, equally fast-consuming, common today to almost all cities in the world.
It is a neighborhood divided by several main avenues from which other streets hang where it is not strange to find, next to a small supermarket of basic products open until late at night, a striking and exclusive fashion club.
But none of this prevents the most genuine Marrakech from suddenly manifesting itself when seeing a family crowded together on an old motorcycle driving, without a helmet, along Mohamed V Avenue, with two little legs hanging from whom one guesses to be the son.
We recommend the Le Kilin restaurant for Moroccan cuisine and the Grand Café de La Poste, a meeting point for the city’s cultural elite since the middle of the last century, with French cuisine and decoration in the purest colonial style. In the afternoon there are jazz sessions.
The Majorelle Garden:
Another must-see in the city, also in the Gueliz neighborhood, is the Jardin Majorelle, a botanical garden that Yves Saint-Laurent acquired and restored, along with the Art Deco-style mansion built by its original owner, the painter Jacques Majorelle. There you can glimpse some of the glamor of the first half of the 20th century and see a sample of the exuberant African flora among the bustle, this time, of the exuberant local ornithological fauna.
It is essential to purchase tickets on their website.
