The secret heart of old Marrakech’s old opens up at a historic guesthouse

THERE won’t be a sign, and every doorway will look the same. The street won’t appear on a map. The taxi driver won’t know how to get there.

But somewhere near the guesthouse in the heart of the Marrakech medina where you booked a room, a gaggle of children will be sitting on a stoop, watching you in your confusion. If you ask them for directions, they will jump up and swarm, demanding money. Promise nothing, but give them something, because they will know the way.

That’s how I found the Riad al Moussika, where I stayed for three days last month while visiting a city that has recently remade itself. The improved Marrakech offers a new variety of accommodation options, including the riads, or small hotels in handsome, historic medina townhouses.

The Riad al Moussika, in a mid-19th century dwelling, is on the south side of the city’s hot, crowded, boisterous medina, where simply going out for a walk exposes a traveler to sensory overload.

Before it became a guesthouse, the riad was owned by Si Hadj Thami el Glaoui, the urbane but cruel pasha of Marrakech, a torture aficionado and a friend of Winston Churchill.

Fortunately, I was admitted not by El Glaoui but by Giovanni Robazza, the current owner and a Marrakech habitué who sometimes wears a long, white djellaba made of fine cotton. Robazza is an Italian, who, like many other Europeans, bought riads in the medina and turned them into guesthouses.

Their often blank entryways belie the paradise inside. The Riad al Moussika, built around a series of courtyards, opens onto a shady courtyard with a long, rectangular splash pool lined by many-colored, hand-cut tiles, known as zellij. The music of caged songbirds fills the air. On their way toward the sky, two tall cypress trees, half-covered in bougainvillea, pass chambers around the courtyard on the second floor and the roof terrace.

At the far side of the pool is a salon with deep sofas and chairs, silken pillows, tassels, tasteful, abstract paintings and a grand piano. The only things missing are Bombay gin and Noel Coward. The first courtyard yields to a second that has wrought-iron tables and chairs, orange trees and a fountain in which rose petals were scattered.

Another salon reached through an elaborately stuccoed archway, a dining room and the hammam, a Turkish-style bath — de rigueur at a riad — border the oasis on the ground level.

Around it on the second floor is a gallery yielding to the library and guest rooms. Massive, richly patterned carpets hang over the balustrades, and all year long the Moroccan sun floods in.

‘Connect with the sun’

THE term riad is loosely applied to hundreds of traditional dwellings turned inward toward their courtyards in Marrakech, Fès, Rabat and Meknès, the four imperial cities of Morocco.

Abdelatif Ben Abdellah, who came to Marrakech as a student, fell in love with the architecture in the medina and has restored about 40 riads in the last 15 years, told me that a courtyard in a true riad must have a fountain and trees.

Beyond that, he said, the principal, elevating characteristic of such dwellings is their openness to heaven, their interior squares of blue sky.

“Little windows on side walls are not enough. People need to connect with the sun on the tops of their heads,” he told me over espresso at Dar Cherifa, a coffeehouse he restored in one of the oldest medina townhouses.

Dar Cherifa, which dates from the 15th century, is near the Mouassine mosque, north of the Place Jamaa el-Fna. It has a cool, pink courtyard with a floor of smooth, sensual tadellakt tile, made of lime; high, gracefully proportioned archways; a carved and painted cedar ceiling; and stuccoing so intricately patterned that the craftsmen who made it had to have been mathematicians, Abdelatif said.

The effect is elegant but austere compared with the Riad al Moussika’s Islamic Baroque.

Abdelatif, who owns Marrakech Riads, a group of five restored guesthouses in the medina, is one of the few native Moroccans in the riad business. Most were purchased by Europeans in the 1990s for as little as $50,000 and renovated as chic Moroccan-modern vacation homes, sometimes with scant concern for historic and architectural integrity.

That concerns Abdelatif. “These buildings are part of our Moroccan patrimony,” he said.

Whether they’re Moorish or Midcentury Modern, they proved expensive to maintain. So, like the owners of historic homes converted to bed-and-breakfast inns in the U.S., the owners here have welcomed paying guests. Now the map of the medina is dotted with hundreds of riad restaurants, cafes and guesthouses.

No one knows how many because the tourist office hasn’t yet figured out how to monitor and rank them, as it does with hotels.

Their advent has helped stem the exodus of the moneyed classes from the medina for suburban oases north and west of town and has given tourists a way to better understand and explore the secret heart of the walled city.

Visitors can now stay here in comfort and style, instead of retreating to hotels on Marrakech’s outskirts.

In the city’s recent growth spurt, hotels also have multiplied. There used to be only one hotel for well-heeled travelers: the landmark Arabic-Art Deco La Mamounia Hotel, owned by the Moroccan king and beloved by Churchill (scheduled to close for renovations for nine months next year).

But Marrakech now also has the luxurious Amanjena, an Áman Resorts hotel, and the Villa des Orangers in the medina and Ksar Char-Bagh in the Palmeraie suburb of Marrakech, members of the vaunted French Relais & Châteaux chain.

If any doubt remains about the city’s newfound international allure, a Four Seasons hotel is breaking ground and is scheduled to open in 2009.

Unlike hotels and much to the satisfaction of certain travelers, riads are imprinted with the personalities of their owners. At Al Moussika, Robazza croons Italian opera, quotes Dante and is almost always around to look after guests. That includes keeping fresh-squeezed orange juice at hand, arranging massages and exfoliating treatments in the hammam, making dinner reservations at his favorite medina restaurants and booking taxis to take guests there and back.

Understanding the tourist’s need for restoration at midday, he serves lunch at the riad, cooked by a Cordon Bleu-trained chef, that is, like breakfast, included in the room rate.

For first-time visitors to intense, confounding Marrakech, the hand-holding is invaluable. Other high-end establishments offer similar TLC: the Riad Farnatchi, where guests are given babouche slippers and a white djellaba robe on arrival and offered a short tour of the neighborhood so that jaunts in the medina become less intimidating.

For such attention, they pay top dollar (about $150 to $300 a night) that astound old hands used to the ancient, budget Marrakech.

A different flavor

FORTUNATELY, among the riads that have lately opened in the city are some that are much less expensive, with few flourishes but their own singular charm, like the Riad Malika. By the time I moved there from the Riad al Moussika, finding my way through the inner medina no longer fazed me.

My taxi driver dropped me near Bab Ksour, a gate on the west side of town. Then I engaged a man with a pushcart to take me and my luggage to the riad.

I had to ring the bell several times before the manager opened the door and admitted me to a large, leafy courtyard with mismatched tables and chairs and staircases leading in mysterious directions.

Adjoining the courtyard was another courtyard, with a postage-stamp-sized pool and the kind of old patio furniture you find at Palm Springs garage sales.

To get to my chamber, I had to climb two steep flights of stairs, cross the roof terrace and descend another narrow, curving staircase, which brought me to a rickety wooden door. It yielded to my room — dark and musty-smelling but large enough to be considered a suite — with a settee, non-working TV, CD player, a double bed, noisy air-conditioning unit, small private terrace and bath.

The tub made me wish I had a can of cleanser. The over-taxed electrical outlets looked like fire hazards. The carpets needed to be taken outdoors and beaten. But once I loosened up, I settled down and enjoyed the place, with its laid-back, live-and-let-live air.

The Riad Malika was one of the first guesthouses to open in the medina. It is owned by a Frenchman who wasn’t around when I was here but who imprinted the place with his love of funky-chic 1960s décor — Naugahyde chairs, bubble lamps, psychedelic tile, posters and bric-a-brac.

Simple but substantial dinners such as chicken and green olive tajine stew are served in the courtyard and included in the room rate (about $120 to $175 a night).

I stood on the roof terrace looking at the low, jumbled cityscape, with its minarets and satellite dishes. Among rooftops nearby were some with awnings and greenery — riads, I surmised, easier to find from above than at ground level, the square eyes of their courtyards gazing into the darkening sky.