Bahia or El Badi: Which Palace Gets Your Morning

The Bahia: a vizier's house with its decoration intact

The Bahia was never royal. It was built by two men who ran Morocco on the sultan's behalf: Si Moussa, a chamberlain who rose to grand vizier, whose two garden chambers carry an inscription dating them to 1866 and 1867, and his son Ba Ahmed, who held the same office and expanded the house between 1894 and 1900. The Ministry of Culture describes the result in a single sentence, as eight hectares built in two phases in the second half of the nineteenth century with courtyards, gardens, salons and outbuildings in marble, moucharabieh, zellij, stained glass, carved and painted wood and stucco. That sentence is the entire official description. There is no plan, no room list and no route.

What that means on the ground is a visit made of ceilings. The rooms are empty of furniture, because Ba Ahmed died in 1900 and the palace was reportedly stripped within hours on the sultan's order, so the walk is about looking up: painted cedar in geometric panels, carved plaster over the doors, and the marble grand courtyard where every photograph in circulation is taken. That courtyard, incidentally, is the newest part of the house, dated 1896 to 1897. The architect of the expansion was Muhammad ibn Makki al-Misfiwi, 1857 to 1926, one of very few nineteenth-century Moroccan builders whose name survives attached to a building you can walk into.

El Badi: the negative of a building

El Badi is three hundred years older and almost nothing of it is left standing. Ahmad al-Mansur began it within months of the Saadian victory at the Battle of the Three Kings in 1578, and paid for it with ransom money and with sugar: Italian columns were bought by weight in sugar, while lime and plaster came up from Timbuktu. Fifteen years of building produced a courtyard 135 metres by 110 with a pool down the middle and four sunken orange orchards around it.

Then it was taken apart. Maintenance stopped when al-Mansur died in 1603, Moulay Rashid used it briefly in 1668 and 1669, and around 1707 Moulay Isma'il ordered the materials carried off to build his new capital at Meknes. Saadian fragments from this courtyard turn up in buildings as far away as Algiers. What you buy a ticket for now is the shape of the thing: rammed-earth walls with nothing on them, the orchards still sunken, an unmarked stair down into the vaulted hydraulic system that fed the pools, another stair up to a terrace on the ramparts, and storks nesting on the wall heads all year rather than seasonally. Inside, one room holds the twelfth-century minbar brought here from the Koutoubia mosque, alongside exhibition spaces that opened in 2018.

Open the state ticket page for the Palais Badii and the description under the tariff opens by saying the palace was founded in 1886 by Abi Imrane Moussa Ben Ahmed Ben Mbarek, grand vizier, and enlarged afterwards by his son Ba-Hmad. Those are the two men who built the Bahia, three centuries later and a kilometre north-east. The Ministry of Culture has printed one palace's history on the other palace's ticket page, and it was still there when we read both pages in Q3 2026.

The consequence is not academic. A visitor who researches by copying the official text arrives at a Saadian ruin expecting a nineteenth-century house with painted ceilings, and leaves disappointed by a building that is doing nothing wrong. Half the online complaints that El Badi is "just walls" are really complaints that somebody was sold the wrong expectation. If two palaces can be swapped on the government's own website, you are allowed to want a comparison that keeps them apart.

The Bahia is the one that stretches. Four courtyards, the small riad garden, the council chamber and the apartments come to about 45 minutes if you keep moving, and about 90 if you stop under each ceiling and work out what is painted, carved and inlaid. There is no signage worth reading, which is exactly why the ceilings reward slowness: nobody is going to tell you that the grand courtyard is the newest room in the building unless you have read it beforehand or you are paying somebody to say it out loud.

El Badi is the one people underestimate in the wrong direction. Walked as a rectangle it takes twenty minutes and feels thin. Walked properly it takes 75: down the unmarked stairs into the vaults, which are the coolest place on the site at midday, into the room with the minbar, and up onto the rampart terrace for the view over the Kasbah quarter towards the Atlas. Miss those three and you have paid $10.65 (100 MAD) for a lap of a field.

The planning number, if you want one: 90 minutes for the two of them at a brisk pace including the eight-minute walk, or a comfortable two and a half hours if you are actually looking. That is the shape the one-day route through the medina is built around, and both fit inside a morning with the Saadian Tombs added.

The two buildings handle a crowd very differently, and this is worth more than any price comparison. The Bahia funnels every group through the same sequence of doorways, so a coach party arriving at 10:30 turns the grand courtyard into a queue for a photograph and the corridors into single file. El Badi is a field with walls around it: the same number of people disappear into it. If your only free slot is late morning in high season, that asymmetry alone should decide your order.

Friday is the one calendar fact that changes both. Moroccan nationals enter every state monument free on Fridays and on the first day of national and religious holidays, which visitors do not, so Friday is the fullest day at both gates. That is our reading of the published tariff rule rather than an official visitor count, and it is set out with the rest of the closures on the Friday and holiday page.

Arrive at nine, or after three

Both gates open at 09:00 and both stop selling at some point before 17:00 that neither publishes. The first hour is the quiet one at the Bahia and the last hour is the good one at El Badi, because the low sun on the rammed earth is the whole point of the ruin photographically and the storks are on the wall heads rather than out feeding. A sensible pairing on a hot day is the Bahia at opening, lunch, then El Badi late; on a cool day, reverse it and take the ramparts in the morning light.

One closure worth knowing about

The ruin has been shut once in recent memory and it was not for a holiday. The September 2023 earthquake cracked walls in its exhibition rooms and around the modern toilets, and the site closed for repair and reopened to visitors the following month. Neither monument publishes a closing day, a last-entry time or an accessibility statement, and the Ministry's page for each runs to a tariff, the 9h to 17h hours and the free-entry line.

If you need certainty about either on a specific morning, the only reliable move is to arrive at 09:00 and look, which costs you nothing because there is no slot to lose.

The two gates are about eight minutes apart on foot, south-west from the Bahia's entrance on Riad Zitoun el-Jdid, past Place des Ferblantiers and the metalworkers' stalls, and in through the wall to Ksibat Nhass. The walk crosses the edge of the Mellah, which is a reason to do it slowly rather than by taxi, and it puts you within a few minutes of the Saadian Tombs on the far side of the Kasbah quarter.

Order matters more than distance. Take the Bahia first at opening, when its courtyards are still empty, and leave the ruin for the flat afternoon light. If you are adding a third monument, add the Saadian Tombs rather than a museum: all three are on the same state tariff, all three sell at the gate, and three foreign adult admissions come to $32.00 (300 MAD) before lunch.

What not to do is buy a combined guided walk expecting the admissions to be inside the price. On most of the cards above the guide is included and the monument fees are not, so the real cost of a three-monument morning is the card price plus 300 MAD in cash. Cards that do include entry say so explicitly, and the ticket index sets the official price beside each one.