Marrakech Gardens and Art: The Majorelle Garden, the Yves Saint Laurent Museum, the Menara Garden Pavilion, the Agdal Royal Garden, the Palmeraie, and the Gueliz New City Character
The Marrakech gardens and art route covers the Majorelle Garden with its cobalt blue villa, the Yves Saint Laurent Museum adjacent to the garden, the 12th century Menara Garden with its Olympic-pool reservoir, the Agdal royal orchard garden, the Palmeraie date palm grove, and the French Protectorate Gueliz new city character.
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Majorelle Garden: The Cobalt Blue Sanctuary
The Majorelle Garden, created by the French painter Jacques Majorelle between 1923 and 1962 and restored by Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge who purchased it in 1980 to save it from real estate development, is the most visited single garden in Morocco with 800,000 annual visitors and the most photographically celebrated single outdoor space in Marrakech. The garden design - the cobalt blue villa (Majorelle blue, the specific ultramarine shade that Majorelle mixed and patented), the yellow terracotta plant pots, the water lily basin, the bamboo grove, and the 300 plant species from five continents - creates the most deliberately non-Moroccan single designed landscape in Marrakech.
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Yves Saint Laurent Museum: The Fashion and Morocco Connection
The Yves Saint Laurent Museum opened in 2017 adjacent to the Majorelle Garden, the most architecturally significant single cultural institution built in Marrakech in the 21st century, celebrates the work of the designer who found in Morocco the colors, the textiles, and the artisanal craft tradition that most influenced his fashion work. The museum permanent collection of the YSL garments, the design sketches, and the photographs documents the most completely Moroccan-influenced Western fashion designer in the 20th century. The museum building by the Studio KO architecture practice is the most architecturally inventive single new building in the Marrakech Gueliz quarter.
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Menara Garden: The Almohad Reservoir
The Menara Garden (Jardin de la Menara), the 12th century Almohad garden 3 kilometers from the medina with the vast rectangular reservoir (200 by 170 meters) and the 19th century green-roofed pavilion reflected in the still water, is the most photographically composed single garden view in Marrakech with the Atlas Mountains snowcap visible above the pavilion roof in winter and spring. The Menara reservoir, built by the Almohad dynasty to supply the city gardens with the Atlas meltwater via the khettara underground irrigation channels, is the oldest continuously functioning single irrigation reservoir in Morocco.
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Agdal Garden: The Royal Orchard
The Agdal Garden (Garden of the Walled Meadow), the royal orchard south of the Marrakech medina walls covering 400 hectares with the olive, the orange, the pomegranate, and the fig orchards irrigated by the Almohad-period khettara system, is the most historically significant single cultivated garden in Morocco and the garden that the Almoravid dynasty originally planted in the 12th century and the Alaouite sultans of the 17th to 19th centuries expanded. The Agdal is open to the public only on Fridays and the Eid holiday periods, making the rare public access the most exclusively timed single garden visit in Morocco.
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Palmeraie: The Date Palm Grove City
The Palmeraie (Oasis of Palms), the 13,000-hectare date palm grove north of Marrakech planted in the 12th century Almoravid period from date seeds carried by the trans-Saharan caravans as their provisions on the desert crossing, is the most historically evocative single landscape in the Marrakech suburbs and the most dramatically palm-shaded single urban area in Morocco. The contemporary Palmeraie of luxury villas, the quad bike track, and the camel riding activity is the most commercially developed single traditional agricultural landscape in Morocco, with 150,000 date palms surviving among the resort and residential development.
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Gueliz: The French New City
Gueliz, the French Protectorate new city (ville nouvelle) built from 1912 adjacent to the medina, is the most complete surviving single French colonial urban plan in Morocco with the wide boulevards, the Art Deco and the Moorish Revival buildings, the pavement cafes, the wine bars, the contemporary restaurants, and the art galleries that create the most cosmopolitan single urban quarter in Marrakech. The Gueliz district contrast with the medina across the Avenue Mohammed V is the most complete single expression of the French Protectorate urban duality that shaped every major Moroccan city and the quarter where the Marrakech contemporary art and nightlife culture is concentrated.