City

Marrakech

Marrakech does not ease you in. The medina hits you all at once — the spice-heavy air, the labyrinth of alleys where sunlight arrives in thin slashes, the muezzin's call bending over rooftops. Paul Bowles understood this. He came in the 1940s and never really left, spending decades translating Moroccan storytellers and channeling the desert's disorienting beauty into prose that made Western readers uneasy. Canetti visited for two weeks and wrote a masterpiece about it. In Jemaa el-Fna, the great square, storytellers still gather their audiences into circles each evening — an oral literary tradition older than any bookshop. Marrakech does not care about your expectations. It overwhelms them, then offers you mint tea and silence in a riad courtyard while you try to understand what just happened.

Last updated 4 days ago