Is Majorelle Worth It? The City's Priciest Ticket

The garden is a hectare, laid out by the painter Jacques Majorelle from 1923, planted with bamboo, cactus, bougainvillea and water features around a villa painted in the intense blue he patented, and bought in 1980 by Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge to stop it being built over. That is the whole of it. There is no second half, no upper floor, no long circuit. Our routing puts the garden alone at about 45 minutes, and it is the rare Marrakech site where a visitor is likely to feel finished rather than rushed.

What you are paying for, then, is density rather than acreage: a small, extremely designed space at a price that would buy admission to a state palace and a museum with change. Whether that is worth it depends almost entirely on the hour you go, which is why the timing section below is the practical heart of this page.

The museum inside the walls is not included

This is where most visitors are caught. Standing among the cactus beds is the Musee Pierre Berge des Arts Berberes, in Majorelle's own studio building, and the plain garden ticket does not open its door. The foundation's own ticket office prices the garden alone at $18.11 (170 MAD) and the garden with the museum at $24.50 (230 MAD), which makes the museum a $6.39 (60 MAD) supplement bought at the same time or not at all. It also keeps different hours: 08:30 to 18:00, last entry 17:30, against the garden's 08:00 to 18:30 with last entry 18:00. Turn up at 08:00 and the garden is open and the museum is not.

One more thing the walls contain and the ticket does not: Villa Oasis, the private garden that was the couple's house. The foundation publishes hours for it, daily except Wednesday, 08:00 to 17:30 with last entry at 17:00, but its individual booking form offers only four combinations and none of them is named Villa Oasis. Do not plan a visit around it without writing to the foundation first.

The gate opens at 08:00, and the tickets are nominative and tied to a time, sold online only through the foundation's own shop, which it states is the sole authorised seller. That means the first slot is a real thing you can buy rather than a rumour, and it is the version of this visit worth paying for: cool air, wet paths, the blue reading properly because the sun is still low, and enough space between people to photograph a bed of cactus without a stranger's shoulder in it.

By the middle of the morning the same hectare is carrying the coach hour. Our reading, not an official visitor count, is that late morning is the worst window and that the site empties again after five. The useful corollary is that late morning is exactly when the medina monuments are at their quietest, so the two swap cleanly: garden at opening, palaces and madrasa at eleven.

Wednesday is the day to check

The garden itself publishes no closing day. The fashion museum next door closes on Wednesdays, and so does Villa Oasis. If your Marrakech Wednesday was going to be the day for all three sites, it is the day for one of them, and the three-site combination is money spent on a door that will not open.

Move it, or spend the Wednesday on the museums that do open.

There is no walk-up window to fall back on

The foundation is explicit that tickets can only be bought online and that it accepts no responsibility for tickets sold anywhere else. That makes this the one significant Marrakech site where turning up without a booking is a genuine risk rather than a mild one, and it is the exception to the argument set out in our booking calendar, where almost every other monument in the city sells the same ticket at the gate as it does online.

Le Jardin Secret sits on Rue Mouassine in the middle of the medina and charges $10.65 (100 MAD), with the tower a separate $4.26 (40 MAD) on top. It is a restored riad garden rather than an artist's collection, laid out in two parts with a working historic irrigation system, and it does two things the famous garden does not. It tells you how long to allow, publishing a range of about 45 minutes to two and a half hours, which not one Ministry monument in this city manages. And it publishes the fullest accessibility statement of any venue we checked: all of the garden except the tower and one of the two cafes is accessible to people with reduced mobility, and wheelchair users and blind visitors with their carers have free and priority access.

Its hours move with the season rather than staying fixed: 09:30 to 19:30 from March to September, 09:30 to 18:30 in February and October, 09:30 to 18:00 from November to January, and 09:30 to 16:30 during Ramadan, with last entry half an hour before closing. Tickets are sold on site, which is the opposite of the online-only rule up in Gueliz.

What it does not have is the thing people actually travel for: the cobalt. If you have seen the blue on a hundred photographs and want to stand in front of it, no medina garden substitutes. If you want an hour out of the noise with a coffee at the end, the medina one is better value and closer to everything else on the gardens page.

It is worth going once, at eight in the morning, on the garden ticket alone. That version costs $18.11 (170 MAD) for about 45 minutes of something you will not see anywhere else, and 45 minutes is not a swindle at that price in a city where a guided walk past three monuments costs less but shows you less that is unique.

It is not worth going at eleven o'clock in April on a combined ticket bought in a hurry. That version costs $33.00 or $35.20, takes three hours, includes a queue, and finishes with the sensation of having paid a lot to shuffle. The gap between those two visits is entirely under your control and it is decided at the moment you choose a slot.

And if the honest answer is that you want a garden rather than that garden, take the medina one and put the difference towards a hammam or an evening on the square. Nobody in Marrakech will ask which garden you chose.