The Djameaa El Fna

The Djameaa El Fna

there's nowhere in Morocco like the Dejemaa El Fna - no place that so effortlessly involves you and keeps you coming back. By day it's basically a market, with a few snake charmers, storytellers and an occasional troupe of acrobats. In the evening it becomes a whole carnival of musicians, clowns and street entertainers. when you arrive in Marrakesh, and after you've found a room, come out here and you'll soon be immersed in the ritual: wandering round, squatting amid the circles of onlookers, giving a dirham or two as your contribution. If you want a respite, you can move over to the rooftop terraces of the Café de France or the Restaurant Argana to gaze over the square and admire the frame of the koutoubia.
what you are part of is a strange process. Some say that tourism is now vital ti the Djemaa's survival, yet apart from the snake charmers, monkey handlers and water vendors (all of whom live by posing for photographs), there's little that has compromised itself for the west. In many ways it actually seems the opposite . Most of the people gathered into circles round the performers are Moroccans - Berbers from the villages and lots of kids.There is no way that any tourist is going to have a tooth pulled by one of the dentists here, no matter how neat the piles of molars displayed on their square of carpet. Nor are you likely to use the scribes or street barbers or , above all, understand the convoluted tales of the storytellers, round whom are gathered perhaps the most animated, all-male crowds in the square.
Nothing of this, though, matters very much.There is a fascination in the remedies of the herb doctors, with their bizarre concoction spread out before them. There are performers, too, whose appeal is universal. The Jemaa Elfna square's acrobats, itinerants from Tazeroualt, have for years supplied the European circuses - though they are perhaps never so spectacular as here, thrust forward into multiple somersaults and contortions in the late afternoon heat. There are child boxers and sad-looking trained monkeys, clowns and chleuh boy dancers - their routines, to the climactic jarring of cymbals, totally sexual (and traditionally an invitation to clients).
And finally, the Djemaa's enduring sound - the dozens of musicians playing all kinds of instruments. late at night, when only a few people are left in the square, you encounter individual players, plucking away at their ginbris, the skin-covered two-or three-string guitars.Earlier in the evening, there are full groups: the Aissaoua, playing oboe-like ghaitahs next to the snake charmers; the Andalucian-style groups, with their ouds and violins; and the back Gnaoua, trance-healers who beat out hour-long hypnotic rhythms with iron clanging hammers and pound tall drums with long curved sticks.
if you get interested in the music there are two small sections on opposite sides of the square where stall sell recorded cassettes : one is near the entrance to the souks and the other is on the corner with the recently pedestrianized Rue Bab Agnaou. Most of these are by Egyptian or Algerian Rai bands, the pop music that dominates Morocco radio, but if you ask they'll play you Berber music from the Atlas, classic Fassi pieces, or even Gnaoua music - which sounds even stranger on tape, cut off only by the end of the one side and starting off almost identically on the other. These stalls apart, and those of the nut roasters, whose massive braziers line the immediate entrance to the potter's souk, the market activities of the Djemaa are mostly pretty mundane.


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The best new holidays in Morocco

THE TOUR  in Morocco

Marrakech-"Morocco City",as early travellers called it -has always been something of a pleasure city,a marketplace where the southern tribesmen and Berber villagers bring in their goods, spend their money and find enter-trainment. For visitor it's an enduring fantasy - a city of immense beauty low, red and tentlike before a great shaft of montains-and immediately exciting. At the heart of it all is a square,Djemaa El Fna, really no more than an open space in the centre of the city, but the stage for a long-established ritual in which shifting cir-cles of onlookers and comedians. However many times you return there, it remains compelling. So, too, do the city's architectural attractions: the immense, still basins of the Agdal and Menara gardens, the delicate Granada-style carving of thesaadian tombs and, above all the Koutoubia Minaret, the most perfect Islamic monument in North Africa.
Unlike Fes, for so long its rival as the nation's capital, the city exists very much in the present. After Casablanca, Marrakesh is Morocco's second largest city and its population continues to rise. It has a thriving industrial area which reflects the rich farmlands of theHaouz plain which surround it: notably flour mills, breweries and canning factories. And it remains the most important market and administrative centre of southern Morocco. None of this is to suggest an easy prosperity-there is heavy unemployment here, as throughout the country, and intense poverty, too -but a stay in Marrakesh leaves you with a vivid impression of life and activity. And for once this doesn't apply exclusively to the new city, Gueliz; the Medina, substantially in ruins at the beginning of this century, was rebuilt and expanded during the years of French rule and retains no less significant a role in the modern city.
The Koutoubia excepted, Marrakesh is not a place of great monuments. Its beauty and attraction lie in the general atmosphere and spectacular location -with the magnificent peaks of the Atlas rising right up behind the city, towering through the heat haze of summer or shimmering white of winter. the feel, as much as anything, is a product of this. Marrakech has Berber rather than Arab origins, having developed as the metropolis of Atlas tribes-Maghrebis from the plains, Saharan nomads and former slaves from Africa beyond the desert, Sudan, Senegal and the ancient Kingdom of Timbuktu. All of these strands shaped the city's souks and its way of life, and in the crowds and performers in Djemaa El Fna, they can still occasionally seem distinct.
For most travellers, Marrakesh is the first experience of the south and-despite the inevitable 'false' guides and hustlers-of its generally more relaxed atmosphere and attitudes. Marrakchis are renowend for their warmth and sociability, their humour and directness-all qualities that (superficially, at least) can seem absent among the Fassis. there is, at any rate, a conspicuously more laid-back feel than anywhere in the north, with women, for example, having a greater degree of freedom and public presence, often riding mopeds around on the streets. And compared to Fes, Marrakesh is much less homogenous and cohesive. The city is more a conglomeration of villages than an urban community, with quarters formed and maintained by successive generations of migrants from the countryside.

For westerners, Morocco holds an immediate and enduring fascination. Though just an hour's ride on the ferry from Spain, it seems at once very far from Europe, with a culture Islamic and deeply traditional that is almost wholly unfamiliar. Throughout the country, despite the years of French and Spanish colonial rule and the presence of modern and cosmopolitan cities like Rabat or Casablanca , a more distant past constantly makes its presence felt. Fes, perhaps the most beautiful of all Arab cities, maintains a life still rooted in medieval time, when a Moroccan empire stretched from Senegal to northern Spain; while in the mountains of the Atlas and the Rif, it is still possible to draw up tribal maps of the Berber population. As a backdrop to all this, the country's physical make-up is also extraordinary: from a Mediterranean coast, through four mountain ranges, to the empty sand and scrub of the Sahara.
All of which makes travel in Morocco an intense and rewarding -if not always easy -experience. Certainly, there can be problems in coming to terms with your privileged position as tourist in a nation that, for the most part, would regard such activities as those of another world. And the northern Morocco cities especially have a reputation for hustlers: self appointed guides whose eagerness to offers their services -and whose attitude to tourists as being a justifiable source of income (and to women as something much worse) -can be hard to ideal with. If you find this to be too much of a struggle, then it would probably be better to keep to low-key resorts like Essaouira or Asilah, or to the more cosmopolitan holiday destination of Agadir, built very much in the image of its Spanish counterparts, or even a packaged sightseeing tour.
But you'd miss a lot that way. Morocco is at its best well away from such trappings. A week's hiking in the Atlas; a journey through the southern oases or into the pre-Sahara; or leisured strolls around Tangier, Fes or Marrakesh -once you adapt to a different way of life, all your time will be well spend. And it is difficult for any traveller to go for long without running into Morocco's equally powerful tradition of hospitality, generosity and openness. This is a country people return to again and again.


THE TAOURIRT CASBAH Approaching from the Boumalen road for Dadès, near to Ouarzazate is the casbah of Taourirt, a name that combines the Arab and Berber languages, meaning "hill fortress" - a structure that is of particular interest both for its fine architecture and its perfect integration into the environmental setting. Originally the residence of the pasha of Marrakesh and a symbol of the feudal period of the lords of Atlas, it consists of buildings that had a mainly military function and developed into a fortified city criss-crossed by numerous alleyways. There is a magnificient view from the terrace of the casbah. across to the mountains and the lake created by the Mansour ed- Dahbi dam, as far as the oases and enchanting Draa Valley.


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The best new holidays in Morocco

The best new holidays in Morocco
From luxury desert camps and riad hotels to Atlas mountains walks and cooking lessons in the souks of Marrakech, we round up the best new holidays in Morocco


The best new holidays in Morocco

Nomadic beach retreat, Atlantic coast

A new trip combines the best elements of different holidays – a pinch of city break, a dash of fitness retreat, a soupcon of beach-bumming – to make a very appealing one. It begins and ends in a boutique riad in Marrakech, with spa treatments and delicious dinners. There's time for lunch in Essaouira and a night in a coastal village villa before the retreat begins in earnest. Each day, early-morning meditation is followed by four hours of walking along secluded beaches, then a luxury camp is set up while you enjoy an afternoon of yoga, reiki, swimming and sunbathing. Drinks are served at sunset and dinner is eaten around the campfire to the sound of tribal singing. The camp moves along the coast each day, with camels carrying everything – and you, if you get tired. 

• £1,150pp for seven days including two nights at a riad, one at a villa and three at a luxury beach camp, all food and drink, hammam, scrubs and massages; and five days of reiki, yoga and meditation. The first trip starts 5 July, +212 6 6121 5062, moroccoretreats.com

Scarabeo Camp, Agafay

Camp Bling (camp-bling.com) is a new website bringing together the most luxurious campsites around the world – it's not just glamping, it's camp-bling, geddit? There are floating lodges in Cambodia, a luxury Galapagos safari site, a New Zealand campsite only accessible by helicopter, and now Scarabeo Camp, a nomadic encampment in Morocco. Eventually there will be four bivouacs across the country but the first to open is the Stone Camp, based in the desert of Agafay, around 40km from Marrakech. The camp moves location according to the season, but there are always views of the desert and the Atlas mountains beyond. Fresh bread is baked daily in a traditional earth oven.

• From €155 half-board for two people in a luxury tent

Sahara Safari Camp, Draa Valley

A new luxury tented wilderness camp, Sahara Safari Camp, opened in February near Zagora and Tagounite, south Morocco, and has now added some budget tents. They still contain proper beds and duvets, and each one has a private bathroom tent a few metres away. The camp has excellent eco credentials: bio-loos, solar lighting, local produce and partnerships with the tribal community to help minimise impact on the land. 

• From £30pp pn for two people and a budget tent, including dinner and soft drinks, specialistmorocco.com

Hotels and riads

The Sirayane hotel in Marrakech

Marrakech

New ones to watch include the Sirayane hotel (doubles from around £120 a night, uk.sirayane.com), in the newly-hip area of Hivernage and the Route D'Amizmiz, designed in a simple style by architect Imaad Rahmouni, with an outdoor swimming pool facing the mountains and a small but stylish spa, plus an hourly free shuttle bus into the medina, around 10 minutes away. The Selman Marrakech (opening offer: around £290 B&B a night, selman-marrakech.com), a glamourous country club-style estate which opened this month, is owned and run by a Moroccan family and home to 16 Arabian horses. Ten are thoroughbreds and not for riding – they're more of a living art installation, roaming the 15-acre grounds – but the remaining six horses can be hired for trekking.

L'iglesia, El Jadida

Boutique Souk, the Morocco travel concierge service, is launching a new property in El Jadida this month. L'iglesia is a converted 16th-century Spanish church, now decorated in a 1940s/50s style, overlooking the sea. A separate wing of the property is housed in the old US consulate, which dates from the period of Portuguese occupation. El Jadida is a relaxed port town on the Atlantic coast, 60 miles south of Casablanca, with long beaches and a Unesco-recognised old town.

• From around £98 a room, boutiquesouk.com

Number Thirty, Essaouira

This quirky townhouse, billed as "Essaouira meets Brighton", is ideal for self-caterers who are looking for something a little different. There are plain walls, splashes of bright colour and retro fabrics – and not a traditional rug or tile in sight. It's in a quiet street in central Essaouira, an easy walk from the beach and restaurants, and has a roof terrace for sunbathing.

• From £100 a night, sleeps six, book through i-escape.com

Temple des Arts, Ouarzazate

Ouarzazate, a Berber city in south‑central Morocco, is a good base for expeditions into the Drâa Valley and the Sahara. The Temple des Artes, a seven-room luxury guesthouse, opened there last year. It is owned by a Moroccan film producer and is a celebration of cinema, with movie-themed suites and brilliantly ostentatious decor. The Atlas Film Studios, among the largest movie studios in the world, are just five miles down the road. They are well worth a visit for the strange site of old movie sets decaying under the desert sun.

• From around £105 a night, templedesarts-ouarzazate.com

Chez Max, Tagadert

This new earth house has been built in the Berber hamlet style, around central courtyards, in a sleepy village near Marrakech. There are six airy rooms and plenty of nooks and crannies, terraces and balconies for reading and relaxing, plus gardens and a swimming pool, and staff to do all the cooking.

• Five nights from £672pp B&B, including flights from London, lawrenceofmorocco.com

Activities

Walking week, Bougmez Valley

KE Adventure Travel has a new easy walking holiday in the Bougmez Valley, a lesser-trodden area of the Atlas mountains. The trip is based at the Touda Ecolodge in the village of Zawyat Oulmzi. Daily guided walks may take you to Lake Izourar in an ancient glacial valley, Ait Ourit, a peak with magnificent views, or to the market town of Tabant.

• £545 for eight days, excludes flights but includes transfers from Marrakech and all meals, departures 1 July, 9 September and 21 October, keadventure.com

History walk, Atlas mountains

Walks Worldwide's new Morocco trip, Raiders of the Lost Kasbah, follows the old caravan trade route across the Tizi n'Telouet pass, stopping at famous fortresses and fortified towns. Accommodation is mainly basic hostels with a night's camping, plus a couple of nights in a three-star in Marrakech.

• Eight days from £475pp, excluding flights, walksworldwide.com

Horse riding, Diabat

Explore the deserted beaches, fishing villages and argan forests south of Essaouira on horseback. You'll ride alongside goat herders, spot turtles and visit argan oil producers. Three nights are spent in a boutique hotel and three in a Berber tent, and the trip is suitable for all levels of experience.

• Seven days from £780pp, excluding flights, golearnto.com

Family holiday, multi-location

Time in Fes and Marrakech will appeal to the grown-ups on this new family holiday, while kids will be happiest in the mountains searching for Barbary apes, discovering dinosaur footprints, playing traditional Berber games and camping under the stars. Accommodation is a mix of hotels, village houses and basic tents.

• 15 days from £799 adults and £732 children excluding flights, explore.co.uk

Foodie

Tagine cookery class, Marrakech

Tagine cookery class, Marrakech 

Urban Adventures has launched short tours in more than 80 cities around the world, where locals take visitors off the beaten track for a few hours. On the Tagine Cookery Class you have a short Arabic lesson to learn the words for key ingredients, go to the souk to shop for fresh produce, have a hands-on cookery lesson, then eat your salads, tagines and couscous for lunch.

• £36 for a four-hour class, urbanadventures.com

Berber lunch, Imlil

The Atlas village of Imlil is the centre of Moroccan mountain tourism and the starting point of many treks. Fleewinter's new day trek is designed to get people into the mountains for a taste of real village life. The highlight is lunch with a Berber family, overlooking one of the valleys. Mules will carry your bags and children.

• Prices vary depending on size of the group, fleewinter.co.uk

Culinary tour, multi-location

Trip Feast specialises in cultural tours with a culinary slant. On the new Exotic Flavours of Morocco trip, you'll make bread and other Fassi specialities in Fez and sample wine in Meknes. You'll meet olive growers and honey producers in rural villages on the way to Marrakech, where you'll go spice shopping, have cookery lessons, sample street food and eat in a hidden palace restaurant. Accommodation is in four-star riads and kasbahs.

• £1,295pp for eight days excluding flights, or £1,595 with flights, including breakfast and some other meals, departing 10 November or 23 March, tripfeast.com.

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