Marrakesh: bright shapes & subtle lines

[Iberia Airlines]

n her seminal travel memoir In Morocco, the reknowned early-20th-century American writer Edith Wharton described travelling in this country as “like turning the pages of some illuminated Persian manuscript all adorned with bright shapes and subtle lines”. Well, if its most tourist-popular city, Marrakesh, is but a few of these pages – what pages they are! Undoubtedly the most brilliant of Morocco’s four “imperial cities” (the others being Fez, Meknes, and modern-day capital Rabat).

Arriving in this country’s fourth-largest city (pop. 953,000) and plunging into its old quarter, you truly do feel like it’s a place out of time, where past and future swirl together in dynamic – sometimes nearly chaotic – movement of colourful sights and sounds, not to mention exotic aromas. 

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