At the foot of the snow-capped Atlas Mountains, the red city acts as a magnet, attracting artists and intellectuals from all over the world.
Marrakech has always attracted writers, painters, explorers and intellectuals to its walls, as well as many prestigious travellers, especially from Europe, who have come to the ochre city to experience its most radiant and intimate charms.
For many of them, the attraction of the city is linked to a collective imagination in which the stories of the Thousand and One Nights that lulled our childhoods are interwoven. It must be said that at the end of the First World War, Orientalism was in fashion, promoted by a powerful need for distraction and a change of scenery.
La Mamounia, the meeting place for the world's celebrities
The opening of the "La Mamounia" hotel, at the height of the Roaring Twenties, brought in a whole host of celebrities and over the years, Marrakech became a bewitching setting for atmospheres conducive to the arts. After the painter Henri Matisse and the Englishman James MacB., Jacques Majorelle set up his studio here. Colette, for whom the city was "sensual and warm", stayed there regularly, as did Maurice Chevalier, Josephine Baker, Edith Piaf, Marguerite Yourcenar and the writer and poet Georges Duhamel, who described Marrakech as the "capital of light".
The cinema quickly made Marrakech the preferred location for its creations. Alfred Hitchcock shot a scene fromThe Man Who Knew Too Muchwith James Stewart and Doris Day. Michèle Morgan and Pierre Brasseur filmed Oasis in 1955… until the last episode of Mission Impossible where the city is used as a setting for Tom Cruise's stunts, who came here to find both exoticism and a light like no other!
The German writer, Elias Canetti, provides part of the key to understanding this strange charm. He used to sit for hours listening to the storytellers in Djema El Fna Square even though he did not understand their language: "I was happy not to understand them. I was happy not to understand them. They remained for me the enclave of an ancient and inviolate life".
A city to make the heart beat faster
For others, Marrakech is their "beloved", as Winston Churchill called it at the time, who used to stay at La Mamounia to escape the throes of politics and regain his strength.
For others still, the city is the place of abandonment and the wandering of the senses, that of a melancholy whose intoxication one seeks, lost in the maze of the Medina's alleys. The famous fashion designer Yves St Laurent considered Marrakech as the "Venice of Morocco, a place out of time".
A crossroads city with a thousand flavours, Marrakech of yesterday, today and tomorrow, fulfils with happiness and greed the dreams of adventure and the desires of life.
Leave a Reply