Marrakech Museums, And What Each One Charges

At the bottom sits Dar Si Said at 30 MAD, a national museum under the Fondation Nationale des Musées, publishing one adult rate for everybody: no foreign fare, no resident fare, no Friday exemption. It is the only ticket in Marrakech that treats a visitor and a resident identically, and it happens to open the best-preserved domestic interior in the medina after the madrasa. At the top sits the Jardin Majorelle at 170 MAD, a private foundation charging for a garden of about a hectare, with two museums on the same plot at 140 MAD each.

The Ministry sets one fare for four very different places

Bahia Palace, El Badi, the Saadian Tombs and the Almoravid Koubba all cost 100 MAD, and they take an hour and a quarter, an hour, forty minutes and twenty minutes respectively. That is a flat tariff applied to a range of about four to one in what you get for it. If the budget only stretches to two of the four, the two with the most behind the door are Bahia and El Badi.

The private venues price themselves, and one of them prices itself out of a list

The Maison de la Photographie at 80 MAD sets its own fare, sells no tickets online and takes card or cash at the desk, and it is the only museum in the city open until 19:00. ANIMA outside the city charges 140 MAD and publishes a euro price beside the dirham one. The Musée de Marrakech publishes nothing at all, which is the subject of its own section below.

Dar Si Said opens Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00 to 18:00, and closes on Monday. It is the only Monday closure in the city: every Ministry monument, the madrasa, the photography museum and the Majorelle garden all open seven days a week or publish no weekly closing day at all. That makes Monday the day to spend on the palaces and the souks, and Tuesday to Sunday the window for the one museum with the carpets in it.

Wednesday belongs to the garden, not the museum

The Musée Yves Saint Laurent closes on Wednesdays while the Jardin Majorelle twenty metres away stays open every day of the year. A combined ticket bought for a Wednesday therefore opens one of the two doors it names. The foundation sells its tickets timed and online only and states that its own site is the sole authorised seller, so a Wednesday mistake cannot be sorted out at the gate.

A conflicting closing day is circulating for Dar Si Said

Several secondary pages print a Tuesday closure for Dar Si Said. The Fondation Nationale des Musées, which runs the museum, states Tuesday to Sunday with the Monday closure on its own page for the venue. We print the operator's own text.

If your date is tight, the museum's telephone line is the check worth making, because the foundation's ticket paths themselves return errors.

What Ramadan does to the doors

Only two entities on this page publish reduced Ramadan hours: the Ben Youssef Madrasa moves from 09:00 to 19:00 down to 09:00 to 16:30, and Le Jardin Secret to 16:30. Nobody else publishes anything, and the Ministry platform prints the same 09:00 to 17:00 all year. Ramadan next falls in February 2027 on the UK Foreign Office's wording, and the exact start is announced by moon sighting shortly beforehand. Friday and holiday openings carries the religious calendar in full.

The Musée de Marrakech occupies the Dar Mnebhi palace on Place Ben Youssef, built for the war minister of Moulay Hassan I around 1898, bought and restored by the collector Omar Benjelloun and opened as a museum in 1997. It is a private foundation. It is not on the Ministry of Culture ticketing platform and it is not one of the national museums, so neither official tariff reaches it, and it must publish its own.

Its own domain refused every connection we made and the apex domain does not resolve at all.

Why we rejected the site that does print a price

The first result for the museum's hours belongs to marrakechmuseum.com, and that site's own footer says it was created by a Marrakech travel agency. It is a commercial reseller writing about a museum it does not run, which makes it a secondary source with an interest, not the venue. The other pages carrying a figure are directories and review sites.

None of them is the museum, so none of them is printed here.

What to do about it on the day

Carry cash, and treat the visit as an unknown of perhaps 50 to 100 MAD by the standard of every comparable private venue in the medina. It stands within thirty metres of the Ben Youssef Madrasa at 50 MAD and the Almoravid Koubba at 100 MAD, both of which publish their fares, so it is an easy addition and an easy skip. The programme is mainly temporary exhibitions, which is the other reason the fare is hard to pin down.

Bought separately the three sites are 170 MAD for the garden, 140 for the Berber Museum and 140 for the Yves Saint Laurent museum, a total of $47.90 (450 MAD). Bought as one ticket they are $35.20 (330 MAD). The saving of $12.78 (120 MAD) is entirely in the Berber Museum, which drops from 140 MAD to a 60 MAD supplement once a garden ticket is in the basket.

Children under ten enter free, and the reduction needs a document

Accompanied children under ten go free at all three sites with proof of age, and from ten years old they pay the student rate. The resident and Moroccan fares need a Moroccan identity card or a residency card at the door, and the student rate needs a valid student card. Holders of a disability card and ICOM members enter free.

None of that is unusual; what is unusual is that the reductions are published in full, which most sellers in the city do not do.

Buy from the foundation, not from a reseller

The foundation states that tickets can only be purchased online, that tickets.jardinmajorelle.com is the sole authorised seller and that it accepts no responsibility for tickets sold anywhere else. Tickets are named and tied to a slot, and individual reservations are capped at fifteen people. Platform listings such as the garden, museum and Berber Museum entry and the garden ticket alone are resold entries, which is a different product from the foundation's own.

Start with the Ben Youssef Madrasa at 09:00 for 50 MAD. It is the cheapest ticketed interior of any substance in the city and the single best room in it, and the courtyard is photographable for about an hour before the first groups arrive. Cross Place Ben Youssef to the Almoravid Koubba if the 100 MAD for twenty minutes appeals, or skip it and walk ten minutes south to Dar Si Said, which opens at 10:00 and costs 30 MAD for an hour of carpets, doors and painted cedar.

Then one palace, then the roof

Bahia Palace is the palace to pay 100 MAD for if you are only paying once: it is the largest interior here and the one where a guide earns the fee, which is why the guided visit with entry included at $8 is the best-value single booking on the whole site. Finish at the Maison de la Photographie for 80 MAD, which stays open to 19:00 when everything else has shut at 17:00 or 18:00.

The Majorelle sites are a separate trip, not an add-on

They are in Gueliz, about half an hour on foot from the madrasa or ten minutes in a petit taxi, and between the garden, the Berber Museum and the Yves Saint Laurent building they will take two and a half hours with the queue. Book the slot first and build the rest of the day around it, because it is the one timed ticket in the city. Whether the garden itself repays 170 MAD is argued out in is the Jardin Majorelle worth it.

What the whole run costs

Madrasa, Dar Si Said, Bahia and the photography museum together are $27.70 (260 MAD) for an international adult, and they fill a day from 09:00 to 19:00 with the souks in the gaps. Adding the three Majorelle sites takes it to $62.80 (590 MAD). The costs page puts those figures beside the rest of a day's spending.

• Nobody publishes a suggested visit length. Not one of the ten venues states how long to allow, so every figure in the Allow column above is our own routing from the size of the building and the number of rooms, and is labelled as such.
• Accessibility is almost entirely unstated. Of the ten venues surveyed for this site, two publish an accessibility statement. The Ben Youssef Madrasa's own list of frequently asked questions poses the question "Puis-je accéder avec un fauteuil roulant?" and then leaves the answer blank, which is the single most telling line on the subject anywhere in the city.
• Photography rules are set at the door. No venue here publishes a policy on tripods, flash or commercial shoots, and the ones that restrict it do so with a sign or a guard rather than a page. Assume handheld and no flash, and ask at the desk if it matters.

And one that is published, and worth reading twice

The Fondation Nationale des Musées shows an "Acheter des billets" button on the Dar Si Said page that resolves to nothing: its own tariff page, its practical-information page and its museums index all returned errors when we checked, and its ticketing subdomain does not resolve. The 30 MAD figure comes from the museum's own page and is solid. The way to buy it in advance does not exist, which is why the museum is a cash-at-the-door visit like almost everything else in the ticket layer.