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Sense and the City

by Carole French
· personal page ·
  · website ·

The hammams, souks, gardens and fabulous cuisine of Marrakech will knock your senses for six.

To say Marrakech is a city for the senses is almost an understatement. One minute you could be cooking and tasting some of the most exquisite food on the planet and the next being scrubbed and doused in a hammam. You can mix with the locals who will almost certainly be engaged in loud, animated conversation, and then slope off to smell the flowers in one of the city’s rich gardens. Marrakech has the lot. It is a city that will capture your heart.

No visit would be complete without time spent in a souk. Traditionally, this is where traders in djellaba (kaftans) sell their goods. They’ve done it for centuries. Indeed, the tempting aromas from food stalls are sure to draw you to squares like Jemaa el Fna in the very heart of the city the moment your plane touches down. Here you can buy everything from ceramics to carpets, plus, as well as cooked foods, as many herbs, spices and fresh produce you could ever need for cooking your own Moroccan dishes. Spices are an essential ingredient to Moroccan cuisine and in the souks you will be able to see stall after stall displaying them. Some will be in jars, others in small colourful mounds.

. . . . .

Marrakech has several cookery schools where a dada, a traditional Moroccan cook, teaches the skills of cooking perfect Moroccan dishes. One of the most famous cookery schools is the workshop of the La Maison Arabe. Here, for around 4000 dirhams, much less if you can get a group of you together, you can learn how to prepare a typical appetizer, such as harira, which is a delicious thick soup made from vegetables and spices, and a main dish. Most students ask to cook a tajine as their main dish, which is a slow-cooked stew of meat jazzed up with lemons, coriander and saffron.

Moroccans love to cook, but when not in the kitchen you’ll probably find them in a hammam. They are a shrewd lot, having discovered hammams and spa treatments years ago. The sensation of being washed and exfoliated, combined with the smell of local roses and spices used in soap and body scrubs is an intoxicating mix. In Marrakech the hammam is a cultural institution. Part of the process of taking a hammam bath is to be vigorously scrubbed with black soap made from olive oil. The spa person will don a kessa, a type of glove used for cleansing, to apply and work the lather on your skin. The treatment leaves you feeling thoroughly cleansed and exfoliated.

After you have showered it’s time for a massage with Argan Oil. A silky honey-coloured oil, Argan Oil is harvested from the kernels of the endemic Argan tree. An organised co-operative of women crack open the kernels, roast the seeds inside, and then grind them to a paste from which the oil is squeezed. You only have to visit one of Marrakech’s hammams to see how popular this ritual is. Both men and women come to relax, beautify with Argan Oil and catch up with the local gossip.

Traditionally, hammams have been housed in the former palaces (riads) that line the network of tiny streets of the souk district. Each were, and in many cases still are, elaborately decorated with walls covered in zellij mosaic tiles in shades of blue, brown and green. Historically, they were places where locals without plumbing in their homes would go to bath, but over time many of the visitors now come to simply relax. One of the city’s oldest is the Hammam el Bacha in the medina’s Rue Fatima Zohra. Here, the atmospheric feel and, of course, the heat will ensure your senses are challenged.

Nowadays, most of the big luxury hotels have a hammam in their well-being complex. A clever mix of the traditional and the contemporary can be found in the La Mamounia Hotel, probably Marrakech’s best known hotel. Built in the 19th century by architects Antoine Marchisio and Henri Prost, it is here world leaders like Bill Clinton and Sir Winston Churchill, and movie stars like Sean Connery have stayed. Alfred Hitchcock was captivated by the hotel too, and shot scenes for many of his films here. Whether any of them enjoyed the hammam we’ll never know, but the spa manager tells me most guests do.

. . . . .

Marrakech is famous too for its gardens. In fact, the La Mamounia’s own garden is rather like an oasis of lawns and date palm trees (Phoenix dactylifera) that stand some 20 metres tall. Not far away you’ll find the Menara Gardens in the Avenue de la Menara and the Aguedal Gardens in the Rue Bâb Ahmer, both of which were created for the ruling sultans some 700 years ago. Each garden has its own character. The Menara is a favourite haunt of photographers keen to capture its lake and pavilion sited so as to afford the High Atlas Mountains as the backdrop, while the Aguedal Gardens is a little haven of tranquillity surrounded as they are by a pisé (red mud) wall.

Marrakech has the contemporary Cyber Parc Arsat Moulay Abdessalam and the La Palmeraie, too, the latter a wonderful space on the outskirts of town that contains over 100,000 mature date palms. But for me, the Majorelle Gardens takes some beating. The gardens are quirky and fun, with bright cobalt blue giving splashes of colour amongst the plants.

The gardens were created by the painter Jacques Majorelle, one of several artistic types who were drawn to what had become one of Europe’s most fashionable cities in the 1920s. His villa, designed to a Moorish style and painted, of course, in his favourite blue, became the centrepiece of a garden full of succulents, palms and bougainvillea, walkways, lakes and fountains that has matured to the fabulous space it is today. A few years back it was owned by the fashion icon Yves Saint-Laurent. Today, you can while away many hours here. If you want to know more about Majorelle, his work and that of his contemporaries step inside the villa. It houses the city’s fascinating Islamic Art Museum.

Marrakech offers a whole new dimension to living, from the sense of touch in its hammams, the exquisite taste of a tajine and the aroma of its gardens to the sights and sounds of its bustling souks. Your senses may take a battering, but my bet is you’ll be back for more.

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(c) Carole French - worldwide rights reserved
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This article was published in
b.there, the inflight magazine of Brussels Airlines  (2011)