How 1912 Split Marrakech Into Two Cities

The sequence is well recorded even where the details are argued over. Morocco had spent the previous decade under mounting pressure: the Algeciras Conference of 1906 limited its sovereignty, the murder of a French physician in Marrakech in 1907 was used as the pretext for sending troops from Algeria into Oujda, and southern aristocrats including High Atlas tribal leaders pledged allegiance to a rival sultan. The French Protectorate in Morocco was established on 30 March 1912. In September of that year, after the Battle of Sidi Bou Othman defeated the forces of Ahmed al-Hiba, French troops took Marrakech, a conquest made easier by the Glaoui family and their tribes changing sides, and followed by a massacre of city residents in the disorder.

The protectorate lasted 44 years, from 1912 to 1956, and for almost all of it one man ran the city. T'hami El Glaoui became pasha of Marrakech and held the post for virtually the whole 44 years of the protectorate, from 1912 to 1956. He is the figure the city's twentieth century runs through: a collaborator with the residency, famous for his lifestyle, eventually part of a plot to depose Mohammed Ben Youssef. Neither the nationalist movement nor French policy could be held off indefinitely, and a protocol granting independence was signed on 2 March 1956.

What the city was like before it

The city the French arrived at was already eight centuries old and already red. The walls were built by Ali ibn Yusuf in 1122 to 1123, and the red sandstone construction that followed them is where the Red City and Ochre City nicknames come from. The colour is a building material rather than a paint scheme or a modern by-law, which is worth knowing before you read anything claiming the protectorate imposed it.

One line from the historical record does more to explain the shape of the old city than any description of its architecture. Until 1867, European Christians could not enter Marrakech without special permission from the sultan, while eastern European Jews were permitted. And until the arrival of the French in 1912, Jews could not own property outside the Mellah, so the whole growth of that quarter was contained within its own limits, which is why its streets are narrow, its shops small and its buildings taller than their neighbours. That is not decorative charm. It is a legal constraint written into the fabric, and it is still legible when you walk the Mellah today.

West of the ramparts, on open ground below the low hill the district takes its name from, a new town went up: wide avenues, a grid, buildings set back behind pavements, and a scale designed around the motor car at exactly the moment the motor car was arriving. Nothing about that plan resembles the city on the other side of the wall, and nothing about it was meant to.

Here is where honesty is required. Every popular account gives a founding date and they do not agree: one well-known travel magazine says the new town was built by the French in 1912 and grew out of a colonial garrison camp, another guide says simply that it went up in the early 1900s and stayed small until this century. We could not find any Moroccan government source that publishes a founding document, a date or a boundary map for the district. The commune publishes lists of arrondissement presidents rather than urban plans, and the national tourist office describes the district without drawing it. So treat the dates in circulation as contested, and hold on to what is verifiable: that the district exists, that it is one of the five arrondissements of Marrakech in law, and that its street pattern is not the medina's.

What got built in the new town, and what that tells you

Two buildings date the place better than any founding claim. La Mamounia, the hotel that has stood for the city's international reputation ever since, was built in 1925 in an Art Deco and Moroccan fusion style by Henri Prost and A. Marchis. Prost is one of the names attached to protectorate urbanism in Morocco, and a hotel of that size going up on that ground in 1925 tells you the new town was already a going concern.

The second is a garden. Jacques Majorelle, a French painter, began planting his garden from 1923, and he did it out here rather than inside the walls because out here was where a foreigner could buy a plot and build a studio with a road to it. Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge bought it in 1980 to stop it being built over, and it is now the most expensive single ticket in the city. The most photographed modern site in Marrakech exists because of the new town, which is not the story the photographs tell.

UNESCO inscribed the Medina of Marrakesh in 1985, at the ninth session of the World Heritage Committee, under four cultural criteria. The property covers 1,107 hectares and its boundary, in the inscription's own words, is correctly defined by the original ramparts that enclose all the requisite architectural and urban attributes. Read that sentence with 1912 in mind and it becomes a verdict on the protectorate's planning: the walls are a usable boundary in 1985 because nobody put a boulevard through them.

The criteria say the rest. Criterion two credits the city with a decisive role in medieval urban planning, noting that Fez, inscribed four years earlier, is an adaptation of the older Marrakech model. Criterion four calls it the textbook example of a large Islamic capital in the western world. And criterion five, the one that matters most for a visitor, describes 700 hectares of ancient habitat: a maze of narrow streets, houses, souks, fondouks and traditional crafts constituting an eminent example of a vibrant historic city, which has become vulnerable due to population growth.

The Committee's own recommendation at the time was that Morocco should conserve the city's exceptional character as a fully preserved historic town, and specifically that it would be advisable to avoid any breaching of the ramparts and to protect the surroundings, in particular the palm grove, the Menara and the gardens of Bab Djedid. Those three places are all still open to a visitor today, and the Menara basin and the palm grove are on this site because of it.

Your bed decides your transport, not the other way round

A riad inside the walls is reached on foot for the last stretch, sometimes for several hundred metres, often through lanes a car physically cannot enter. A hotel in the new town is reached by taxi to the door. Neither is better; they are different products of 1912.

What matters is that you decide deliberately rather than discover it at midnight with luggage, which is the argument the where-to-stay page is built around, and getting around covers what the licensed taxis can and cannot do.

The city has two commercial cultures, not one

The national tourist office's own description pairs the new town with Hivernage in a single sentence about modern infrastructure, luxury boutiques, international ready-to-wear and airy avenues, and frames the crossing as leaving the ramparts to be immersed in modern Morocco. Take that as the marketing it is, and note what it concedes: fixed prices and shop windows on one side, negotiation and the souk on the other. Travellers who find the medina exhausting are usually not tired of Morocco, they are tired of bargaining, and there is a whole city 20 minutes away where nobody expects it of them.

The old city is emptying, and that is in the record

In 1984, about 51% of the city's population lived inside the walls. By 2004 it was 22%, as housing was converted to commercial use and the city expanded outward. The 2024 census records 81,103 residents in the medina arrondissement against 1,002,697 in the city as a whole.

That is the demographic change UNESCO's criterion five names as the property's vulnerability, and it is visible as soon as you look: the lanes that carry the traffic are the ones with shops, and the ones that do not are quiet in a way a living quarter usually is not.

The census shows where the city actually went

The 2024 count puts the city at 1,002,697 residents and the wider prefecture at 1,571,580, and the split between the five arrondissements is the clearest single picture of what a century did. Menara, out towards the airport, holds 522,259. The new town holds 219,863.

Sidi Youssef Ben Ali, beyond the ramparts to the south-east, holds 107,966, and Annakhil, running north-east towards the palm grove, 71,506. The walled city holds 81,103, fewer than any of them except the last. A visitor spends most of a trip in the smallest arrondissement in Marrakech, which is worth remembering when the lanes feel crowded: the crowd is largely visitors, and it thins to nothing three streets off the route, as the map page shows.

There is no protectorate museum in Marrakech and no marked trail, so the period has to be read off buildings that were doing something else. Four are worth the detour.

The first is the Bahia, which housed the French resident-general from 1912. That occupation is the reason the palace is in repair at all: a building in official use gets a roof kept on it, where the Saadian ruin down the road did not. The second is Dar Si Said, the house of a vizier's brother, which was converted into a museum of Moroccan art and woodcraft during the 1930s and reopened after renovation in 2018 as the national weaving and carpet museum. A colonial administration turning a private palace into an ethnographic museum is the period's characteristic gesture, and the collection is still organised around it.

The third is the garden in the new town, which is a French painter's private project turned into the city's most visited paid site. The fourth is the new town itself, walked rather than visited: Avenue Mohammed V from the wall outwards, the set-back facades, the plane trees and the pavement cafes, none of which exist on the other side of the ramparts and all of which are a century old. Give it 60 minutes in the late afternoon and the two cities stop being an abstraction. The avenue runs about 2 km from the wall to the far end of the district, which is a comfortable walk in either direction.