Marrakesh by day is an assault. That’s not a criticism — it’s the point. The souks press in from every direction. Mopeds appear from gaps that don’t look wide enough for a person. Sellers call from doorways. The smells hit you in sequence — spice, smoke, something sweet from a cart you can’t locate. By day four we’d learned to love it. But we’d also learned that the city we were seeing was the city it put on for visitors.
So I set the alarm for six.
The walls
I slipped out of the riad while it was still dark and found the route along the outside of the medina walls. A long, straight path — cobbled, lined with orange trees on one side and the ancient ramparts on the other. The sky was that particular shade of pre-dawn grey that makes everything feel briefly simplified. A few figures moving in the half-light. Nobody selling anything. Nobody selling anything to me.
This is the city at rest. It’s a different city.
The long path along the ramparts. Orange trees. Grey sky. The only sound was footfall.
The walls of Marrakesh’s medina run for almost ten miles. I wasn’t going to cover all of them, but I was going to try a large arc — skirting east, dropping south, coming back around through the western gates. Thirteen miles in total, which tells you I took a few wrong turns. That was part of it.
A mural on a rose-pink wall — bicycle, sun, flowers, bougainvillea above. Nobody painted this for tourists. I found it at a dead end.
The gates
You navigate Marrakesh’s old city by its gates. Each one is a different proposition. Bab Agnaou — the ceremonial southern gate — is almost theatrically grand, its carved stone arch layered in geometric relief work, birds lined up along the top as if they own it. A moped and a yellow petit taxi passed through while I stood there. That combination — twelfth-century stonework, a Fiat Doblò, a scooter — is very Marrakesh.
Bab Agnaou. The birds on the roofline are not concerned with the traffic below.
The smaller gates are different. A plain archway in a pink wall, with a crenellated tower above and three glowing orange slot-windows catching the interior light. You pass through and you’re in the medina’s network of alleys, where minarets appear at the end of streets and satellite dishes cluster on rooftops and there is no particular logic to either.
One of the older medina gates at blue hour. The windows were the colour of lit charcoal.
Getting lost
I got lost several times. That was on the Strava caption — “Yes I did get lost a few times” — and it was true, and it was also fine. The alleys of the southern medina are quieter at dawn than anywhere I’d been in the city. A minaret visible above the roofline is a landmark. A very large bin and a blue three-wheeled delivery truck are also a landmark, of sorts.
Empty alley. Pre-dawn quiet. A minaret at the end of it, as if placed there deliberately.
What you notice in the quiet is the texture. The walls range from clean rendered pink to crumbling mud brick to newer concrete — sometimes on the same block. Cables run across facades. Wooden shuttered doors with ironwork. An ornate lit building at blue hour, brickwork detailed, a potted palm outside — the kind of architectural detail you only stop to photograph when you’re not being jostled.
Blue hour on one of the side streets. Some corners of the medina have been beautifully restored.
Something out of place
On one of the wider streets near the southern edge, I passed a compound with a gold dome rising above walls and cypress trees. It sat against a grey sky and looked faintly unreal — like something from a different city had been quietly inserted into this one. I didn’t stop long. Some things are more interesting from a distance, at pace.
A gold dome above the cypress trees. Incongruous. Memorable.
The parks
The southern boundary of the medina opens up to wide roads and, beyond them, gardens. A long avenue of palms and clipped hedges, a small fountain at the end, a man in an orange hi-viz working alone in the early morning. Everything still and ordered. After forty minutes in the alley network, it felt like stepping into a different story.
Palm avenue. Six forty-five in the morning. A man sweeping. Nobody else.
The Koutoubia
I came back around through the Koutoubia gardens and stopped for longer than I probably should have. The minaret is everywhere in Marrakesh — you see it from rooftops, from alley ends, from moving taxis — but from the gardens in the early morning, with the ruins of the original mosque laid out in their grid of stone plinths and nobody else around, it earns the attention properly.
Twelve centuries of building on the same site. The rows of stone foundations in the foreground, then the wall of the current mosque, then the tower rising to a finial against the grey sky. That alignment of things — ruin, wall, monument — doesn’t need explaining.
The Koutoubia minaret above the ruins of the original mosque. The stone plinths are what remain of the first building.
The gardens, earlier. Still and orange-treed. The minaret at the back of frame.
Jemaa el-Fna at dawn
The square was almost quiet. A line of horse-drawn caleches along one edge — green carriages, bored horses — with Festival du Film de Marrakech banners above them. A handful of people crossing. No snake charmers, no orange juice sellers, no musicians. The caleche drivers glanced over and looked away.
I’ve never been to a place so thoroughly transformed by the time of day.
Caleches and film festival banners. The square without its crowd is a different place entirely.
Pikala
On one of the wider roads I passed something I’d have missed at tourist pace: Pikala Bicycle Atelier, set into a run of arched bays in the medina wall. Three bays: Education, Pikala Bicycle Atelier, Eco Tourism. Bikes stacked inside. The kind of social enterprise that you suspect is doing something genuinely useful and isn’t making a fuss about it. A small thing to notice. Worth noticing.
Pikala Bicycle Atelier. Education. Eco Tourism. Arched bays in the city wall. Running past it felt like the right speed to find it.
The medina waking up
By the time I came back through the streets nearest the riad, the city was stirring. Mopeds moving between pedestrians with the particular confidence of people who’ve never not had right of way. Families on foot — children in school uniform. A tea urn on a cart to the right of frame. The narrow streets doing what they do: fitting far more life into them than you’d think possible.
The medina streets at seven-thirty. The logic resumes. Mopeds, families, tea urns, pink walls.
A certain kind of city
I took the wide road back, along a boulevard of palms and agave and blue-flowering plants, the Atlas Mountains just visible on the horizon under a pale pink sky. It had taken two hours and thirteen minutes and thirteen miles to see a version of Marrakesh that most people who visit don’t see, because they don’t come out early enough.
It’s not the medina that stops when you do. It was going the whole time. You just weren’t awake for it.
The road south. Blue flowers, olive trees, the Atlas in the distance. The city behind.
The wide boulevards as the city starts its day. Palms, mopeds, pink light.
Marrakesh, Morocco – 13.20 miles – 2hrs 01m 32s – 239ft elevation – 9:12 /mi