About Our Trip

Back to the City, in Marrakesh we'll be staying at the quiet hotel Chellah, which is built around a beautiful courtyard in which the orange trees give protecting shade from the harsh heat of the sun.
Marrakesh is also one of the hectic places of Morocco.
Here, by day and especially by night we will be seeing the Place Djemaa el-Fna, the pulsating heart of the city. We'll have a walk through the souqs and pay the Palais de la Bahia a visit to name only a few of the locations we'll see.
As if out of tales of thousand and one Arabian nights, Marrakesh is one of the places, when travelling through Morocco, that shouldn't be missed.


About Marrakesh

Marrakesh awakens just as it has done every morning for more than 800 years, with the same inflected intonation, the call of the Muezzin going out from the 70 metre high Koutoubia, the spiritual beacon of Marrakesh.
Sunrise over Marrakesh. A multicoloured crowd invades the winding streets of the medina. Groups of men jostle towards the Ben Youssef mosque, nestling against the Medersa, the vast and superb koranic school founded by the Mérinide sultan Abou el-Hassan.

One of Morocco's most important cultural centres, Marrakesh is a lively former capital famed for its markets and festivals. Its wildly beating heart is the Place Djemaa el-Fna, Marrakech's pulsating main square and one of the world’s great theatres. Rows of open-air food stalls are set up here and mouth-watering aromas fill the air. Jugglers, storytellers, snake charmers, magicians, acrobats and assorted benign lunatics take over the rest of the space, all competing for your eye. The souqs here are among the best in Morocco. Within the many attractions of the ancient quarter is the rare Almoravid-style Koubba Ba'adiyn mosque annex and the Palais Dar Si Said.
Focus of every approach to the city is the Koutoubia Mosques minaret, Marrakech's crowning centrepiece, the 203 feet high tower, the very synthesis of Moslem architecture.
Other sights to visit are the Saadian tombs dating from 1557, over-lavish maybe, but sensational nevertheless.

It is a Berber rather than Arab city, the traditional metropolis of Atlas tribes, Mahgrebis from the plains, Saharan nomads and slaves from beyond the desert. It was founded around 1062 by Youssef bin Tachfine of the Almoravide dynasty. It was his son Ali Ben Youssef who brought architects and craftsmen from Cordoba to build palaces, baths and Mosques, a subterranean water system and in 1126 the first circuit of walls were raised from "tabia" - the red mud of the plains. Marrakech's setting is truly magical. A patchwork of ravishing green against the bare, brown plain of Haouz with the snowy High Atlas rearing up behind.