The Warm-Winter Issue

February is the month the northern winter stops being charming, and Marrakech is the cure hiding three or four hours down the map — a city built, from the ground up, around the idea of sitting in the sun. The medina is a maze of blank walls and plain doors; all the life is turned inward, into courtyards, because for centuries that was how you kept a house cool, green and private in a hot, close city.

The riad is that idea you can book a bed inside. Behind an unmarked door on a lane too narrow for a car, a converted courtyard house opens onto a tiled patio, an orange tree, usually a small plunge pool, and a roof terrace for breakfast in the sun. The trade-off never changes: deep in the medina is the real thing but a walk-and-a-porter from anywhere a taxi can reach; nearer a gate, or out in the palm groves, is easier but quieter.

The city is really two cities. Inside the walls is the old Marrakech of the souks and the Jemaa el-Fna, the great square that turns from juice stalls to food smoke to storytellers as the day goes on. Guéliz, the French-built new town, is where you go for a proper restaurant, a glass of wine, and the cobalt-blue Majorelle garden that Yves Saint Laurent rescued and everyone now photographs.

And when the medina gets to be too much, the escape is close. An hour up into the High Atlas puts you among Berber villages and cold, clear air; a shorter run out to the stony Agafay gives you a stand-in desert of camel-coloured hills within sight of the snow. A day of either resets the whole trip.

— Vivienne Hartwell, Editor-in-Chief