A long weekend in Marrakech, and the medina navigation problem

What to take away

• GPS inside the medina is unreliable. Navigate between named gates and squares, not turn by turn.
• Stay in a riad inside the walls. The door looks like nothing and the inside is the point.
• The souks are best in the morning and worst at 17:00, in every sense.
• A day in the Atlas is six hours of the day spent in a car and valley. Budget it as a full day.
• Agree a taxi price before getting in, every single time, without exception.

The medina does not work the way your phone thinks it does

The old city is a few square kilometres of alleys, many of them unnamed, some of them covered, and a good number of them ending in a wall or a private door. Phone navigation shows a route through them with total confidence and is wrong often enough that following it turns a ten minute walk into forty.

This happened to us within an hour of arriving. Four people, three suitcases, one blue line on a screen and a dead end containing a man with a cart, twice.

What works is landmark navigation. The medina has fixed points that everyone knows: the gates, Jemaa el-Fnaa, the Koutoubia minaret, the main souk arteries. Plan a walk as a sequence of those and use the alleys between them freely, because the small streets almost all lead back to a big one eventually. We rebuilt every medina day around this and never got properly lost again.

• Learn four landmarks on day one: Jemaa el-Fnaa, Koutoubia, Bab Doukkala, Riad Zitoun el Jdid.
• Screenshot the riad location and the nearest gate. Signal drops in covered souks.
• A guide for the first afternoon costs little and pays for itself in orientation.
• If you are lost, walk uphill in noise. Busy alleys lead to squares, quiet ones lead to doors.

Riad or hotel, and why the answer is riad

A riad is a house built inward around a courtyard, usually with a roof terrace and no external windows. From the alley it is an unmarked door in a wall. Inside it is tiled, quiet and about fifteen degrees cooler than the street.

For four people this was the correct choice by a distance. We had the whole house, breakfast on the terrace, and somewhere to retreat to at 15:00 when the medina becomes hard work. The new city hotels are more comfortable in a conventional way and put you twenty minutes and a taxi away from everything you came for.

Two practical notes. Check that the riad is reachable, some are a five minute walk from the nearest point a taxi can reach, and someone will usually meet you at the gate if you tell them when you are arriving. And ask for the terrace: it is where the evening happens, and the call to prayer across the rooftops at dusk is the thing I would go back for.

The souks, and what to do about the prices

The souks are a genuine working market, not a tourist reconstruction, and the further north you go from Jemaa el-Fnaa the more of it is aimed at people who live here. Around the square it is lamps and leather; twenty minutes in you find dyers, metalworkers and the wool market.

Haggling is expected on crafts and normal on almost anything without a printed price. The opening number is usually two to four times what the item goes for. Decide what you would pay before asking, say it once, and be willing to walk away without any drama.

Two things we did not know beforehand. The morning is the calm version of the souk and the late afternoon is the intense one. And if you say yes to being led somewhere, you are typically going to a shop that pays a commission, which is not a scam so much as an economy, but it means you will not end up where you thought you were going.

The sights worth the ticket

Bahia Palace is the one to do properly. Nineteenth-century, a sequence of courtyards and painted ceilings, and it is beautiful early and full by 11:00. Around 10 euros equivalent and worth booking a slot.

The Yves Saint Laurent museum and the Jardin Majorelle share a site in the new city and sell timed entry that regularly goes out days ahead. The garden is small, extremely photographed and still striking; the museum next door is better and much quieter.

Ben Youssef Madrasa reopened after a long restoration and is now the most impressive interior in the medina, a fourteenth-century student college around a courtyard of carved cedar and tile. El Badi Palace is the opposite: a vast ruin with storks nesting on the walls, and it works precisely because there is nothing left to look at except scale.

The day out: Atlas, Ourika or Agafay

Three versions of this day get sold on every street. The Atlas villages and Imlil is the mountain one, about 90 minutes each way, walking in a valley with a mule track and a village lunch. Ourika valley is closer, greener, and much busier at weekends because it is where Marrakech goes. Agafay is stony desert forty minutes out, sold as "the desert" and best at sunset with dinner.

The Sahara is not a day trip. Merzouga is roughly nine hours each way by road and any tour selling it as an overnight from Marrakech is selling you two very long days in a minibus.

We did Imlil and it took the whole day, about seven hours door to door with four hours on the ground. Worth it. Bring shoes with grip, and be aware that a mule and a guide will be offered at the trailhead, which is fine, agreed in advance, like everything else here.

The evening on the square

Jemaa el-Fnaa at 19:00 is a food market with a hundred numbered stalls, smoke, drummers, orange juice carts and men with monkeys and snakes, and it is intense in a way photographs do not convey. It is also, unavoidably, the most touristed place in the country.

It is still worth doing once, and the trick is the rooftop cafes around the edge. Sitting above it with a mint tea for the twenty minutes when the light goes and the smoke rises is one of the better sights in Morocco, and it costs the price of a drink.

Avoid the animal photos, which are a welfare problem, and expect to pay for any picture with a person in it. Eat at the numbered stalls if you like, or eat better fifty metres away and come back for the atmosphere.

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