Morocco

Morocco’s luxury hotel identity runs overwhelmingly through Marrakech, a city whose medina, its walled old town, gave rise to the riad as a hotel form: a traditional courtyard house, rooms arranged around a central garden or pool and turned away from the street, now adapted at every scale from a handful of rooms to palace-sized grand hotels.

The regions, briefly

The Marrakech medina holds the highest concentration of riad-style hotels, reached on foot or by handcart through narrow lanes, and ranging from intimate, family-run conversions to the elaborate, garden-set palaces that have defined the city’s grand-hotel tradition since the early twentieth century.

The Palmeraie and the city’s outer edges, an oasis of date palms outside the medina walls, hold a different scale of property: larger footprints, more extensive gardens, and a greater sense of openness than the dense medina allows.

The Atlas Mountains, a short drive south of Marrakech, offer an entirely different Morocco: Berber villages, walking and trekking country, and lodges built into the foothills with views toward North Africa’s highest peaks, a genuine change of altitude and pace from the city below.

Beyond Marrakech, Morocco’s Atlantic coast, its Sahara-edge desert camps, and cities including Fes and Essaouira carry their own hotel traditions; the destination guide here reflects properties covered so far, with further additions to follow as research continues.